Its greenness, however, is apparent only to chemistry students at the college preparatory charter school.
The bus runs on biodiesel - fuel the students make themselves in science class as part of an environmental learning project that began two years ago with a grant the school received.
Science teacher Shea Wickelson said alternative fuels came up while students were studying global warming and pollution. By the end of the year, the budding scientists were making their own biodiesel to run the bus the school had purchased with the help of another grant.
Last month, City Academy received another grant from Project Learning Tree, an environmental education program of the American Forest Foundation, to continue the service-learning project and share it with other schools.
The $1,000 grant will cover the basic ingredients, maintenance of the bus and presentations of the project to other schools.
Students say it costs about 50 cents to make a gallon of biodiesel.
The process they employ involves collecting used vegetable oil from a local restaurant, adding chemicals and cleaning it with water. The school can make about 20 gallons at a time in its large processors. In class, students make about one liter at a time.
"It's the perfect level of science for high school chemistry. It challenges them, but it also gives them a reason to take environmental science or chemistry," Wickelson said.
The bus is used only for field trips. Already students have traveled to several destinations in Utah and other states using the school-made fuel. The traveling includes the school's summer outreach trips, which involve doing volunteer community work.
The bus uses between 20 to 30 gallons a month. For longer trips, up to 80 gallons of fuel are stocked.
Members of the academy's Green School Committee are in charge of maintenance, making the fuel and sharing the project.
"It's a cool project. It was something new and we got to have ownership over it," junior Libby Giles said.
---
* ROXANA ORELLANA can be contacted at rorellana@sltrib.com or 801-257-8693.
