While trying to sort out storing/retrieving binary values in an env var on Heroku, I noticed that ecological only used os.environ and not also os.environb.

I don't know if it's useful to add; just wanted to let you know in case you hadn't considered it. It didn't matter in our case; the Heroku CLI didn't support setting the binary value in the first place, so I fell back on using base64 which worked equivalently for both environ and environb.