The magazine, entitled ‘Time for a New Clean Air Act’ (available here), had 11 articles from air quality experts addressing a range of current air quality topics.
The article by Ben Marner, ‘Fact or fiction: The story of measuring NOx emissions from modern diesel vehicles’ (available here), deals with our evolving understanding of real-world emission of nitrogen oxides from diesel vehicles, and how Euro standards have not delivered what they should have. It is based on detailed reviews of the literature carried out by Ben, which led to his development of Air Quality Consultants’ CURED tool to take account of real-world emissions from diesel vehicles for use in air quality assessments.
The article by Kieran Laxen ‘Will backup generators be the next ‘Dieselgate’ for the UK?’ (available here), sets out how the growth in the use of generators to provide power to the grid is providing air quality challenges. The article, which draws on Kieran’s extensive experience of assessing such generators, identifies that impacts can be wrongly ignored on the basis the generators are not used all the time. Kieran has since been inputting to Defra’s adoption of the Medium Combustion Plant Directive, which will cover generators, and to Environment Agency guidance designed to ensure impacts are appropriately assessed.
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