MGM Resorts is being honored with a national award for its efforts to recycle food from its Strip properties.

The Environmental Protection Agency honored the gaming company for outstanding achievement in food waste recycling. The company will get the EPA’s 2011 WasteWise Gold Achievement-Food Recovery Award.

Last year, MGM Resorts recycled 8,722 tons of food waste from its Las Vegas hotels. That is 25 percent of all recycled waste from the resorts. When the program first started, the resorts recycled just 3,353 tons of food waste. The resort company works with RC Farms in North Las Vegas, which feeds the food to its 3,000 pigs. The waste is also gathered by A1 Organics, which turns it into compost.

Natural gas powered cars, buses and shuttles will have a convenient place to fuel up with the opening of a new natural gas station.

The station will open Thursday at McCarran International Airport. Clean Energy Fuels is running the station. It is one of seven the company plans to open in the Las Vegas Valley. Natural gas burns much cleaner than traditional fuels and is more economical.  The company picked our city because we already had infrastructure in place to support natural gas fleets.

The station will be open for personal cars and for cars that are part of a fleet.

The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada (RTC) in partnership with Coca-Cola awarded laptop computers to the 40 winners of an essay contest that asked local high school seniors to write a 500-word essay on how they can reduce their carbon footprint by using the services offered by the RTC.

"The level of participation was remarkable. We received hundreds of essays from students on how they use our growing transit system, bicycling amenities and other environmentally friendly services to reduce our carbon footprint," RTC General Manager Jacob Snow said.

The essay contest was open to all high school seniors graduating in 2011. Each essay was judged equally on its content and the quality of the writing.