Industry News
WHO report adds pressure for stricter Euro-5 standards – T&E
7th March 2006
The 2005 World Health Organisation’s European Environment and Health Committee report on air pollution suggests the emissions limits in the EU’s proposed Euro-5 standards are too high, reports the European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E) lobby group.
The WHO’s air quality guidelines on particulate matter (PM) and other air pollutants
propose lower maximum levels for both PM10 and PM2.5 than the current Euro-5 proposal. The guidelines for PM2.5 are 10μg/m3 as an annual average and 25μg/m3 as a daily average. For PM10 they are 20μg/m3 annual and 50μg/m3 daily. The WHO’s report says: “These are the lowest levels at which total, cardio-pulmonary and lung cancer mortality have been shown to increase … in response to PM2.5 in the (2002) American Cancer Society study.”
T&E also notes that recent research by two German technology institutes, the TUG and FVT, reportedly shows that NOx emissions from diesel vehicles are higher than the figures obtained from the testing procedures required under EU type approval regulations. The TUG and FVT, presenting their findings in February, suggest NOx emissions were reduced much less that had been assumed between the Euro-1 and Euro-4 standards, and indeed had not been significantly reduction in the last 13 years.
The EU test cycle has allegedly allowed manufacturers to tune engines to reduce NOx only on the test cycle, a practice known as “cycle beating”.
T&E policy officer Aat Peterse argues for a stricter NOx standard for diesels which would force manuacturers to use after-treatment technologies rather than just tune engines to reduce NOx. As well as stopping ‘cycle beating’, this would enable manufacturers to retune engines to optimise CO2 emissions and improve efficiency, thus reducing fuel consumption, CO2 emissions, NOx and thus particulate matter, to which NOx contributes.
The US, points out T&E, has stricter standards for diesel vehicles than the EU’s proposed Euro-5 – standards which have led Mercedes-Benz to unveil its new urea aftertreatment system in a BLUETEC-branded diesel model targeted at the US market.
- The WHO says it "acknowledges that the UK government supports EC proposals for Euro-5 standards aimed at forcing adoption of diesel particulate filters on all new diesel cars and vans, and that the UK has been instrumental in progressing international research into new methods of measuring vehicle exhaust particle emissions in case the current mass-based technique proves insufficiently sensitive to force adoption of diesel particulate filters."
(www.euro.who.int, www.t-e.nu)
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