Dive Brief:
- Newport Beach, CA-based Clean Energy Fuels Corp. announced that it will construct new compressed natural gas (CNG) stations for Arlington Transit (ART) in Arlington, VA; Nassau Inter-County Express (NICE) in Nassau County on New York's Long Island; and North Kansas City (MO) School District, which will become the largest U.S. school district to switch its school bus fleet to CNG.
- "Despite lower oil prices, Clean Energy continues to add fueling partnerships across all our transportation markets," Andrew J. Littlefair, president and CEO of Clean Energy, told Recycling Today.
- Clean Energy designed a new CNG station in Spokane, WA that will begin fueling 20 solid waste trucks. The plan calls for adding up to 10 trucks per year with as many as 100 being fueled at the station.
Dive Insight:
CNG is cheaper than diesel and allows companies to save money while going green. So it's no wonder the shift to CNG trucks is an enormous trend in the waste and recycling industry, with leading companies like Waste Management and Republic Services setting the pace.
"Our customers want a greener solution and so it's absolutely a greener solution. And then what's good for the business? With the (price) difference between diesel and natural gas, it makes financial sense. And so when you do something that makes financial sense for the company and makes good sense for the environment, that's what we like to do," said Waste Management CEO David Steiner in an interview with Bloomberg last month.
Others following the trend include Honda, which has opened its first CNG "fast-fill" refueling station in Marysville, OH, and Garden City Sanitation in Santa Clara, CA, which signed an operations and maintenance agreement that will serve 45 refuse trucks that consume 350,000 diesel gallon equivalents (DGEs) a year.
