Photo of two young boys with backpacks walking past a school sign that reads &quote;Children breathing - no idle zone. Turn your engine off."

A Clean Cities project leader and community volunteers successfully address the problem of too many idling cars at a Denver-area school.

In addition to being a parent of school-aged children, Kay Kelly also helps vehicle fleets adopt alternative fuels and implement advanced vehicles and technologies, like idle reduction, through her work with the Clean Cities program.

Waiting in the line of cars to pick up her sons from school each day, Kelly realized that her children and their classmates walked out into invisible-yet-harmful fumes created by the dozens of idling vehicles outside their school.

“Professionally, I understood the impacts that greenhouse gas emissions and petroleum consumption in transportation can have on the environment around us,” Kelly said. “I wanted to leverage this knowledge to support improved air quality locally, and volunteered to help address the idling issue at our school.”

Read the full post on the Energy.gov Energy Saver blog to learn how Kelly and her community reduced vehicle idling and eliminated nearly 6 tons of greenhouse gas emissions from a Denver-area school zone.