Mobile source pollution is one of the major reasons for the deterioration of air quality in the metropolitan area and also the key point which the environmental-protection and traffic authorities focus on. Besides, emitting the black smoke from diesel vehicles is most series problem blamed by citizens. To reduce the emissions of diesel vehicles, Environmental Protection Administration(EPA) implements not only irregular inspection, but also enhances the control measures for diesel vehicles. For example, accelerate the elimination the Tier-1 and Tier-2 heavy-duty diesel vehicles(HDDVs), encourage enterprises to hire environmental-protection fleets, establish the low emission zones to prohibit or limit old diesel vehicles to use and plan the annual target of Tier-3 HDDVs to install the diesel particulate filter(DPF). It is anticipated to eliminate 80,000 Tier-1 and Tier-2 HDDVs and install the DPF on 38,000 Tier-3 HDDVs with three years. The EPA has announced to modify Air Pollution Control Act on June 23, 2017 to authorize the Environmental Protection Bureau to allocate low emission zones.
Regarding to the DPF, this plan collected and analyzed data of the 506 garbage trucks with DPF from Taipei city and other 12 cities, the result was confirmed the overall pollution improvement rate is up to 69.7% and the horsepower ratio deterioration is only 0.6%. It also can be ensured that the DPF can ideally work by carefully selecting the vehicles, good quality of filter material, implementing the regular regeneration and correctly maintenance. To promote installing the DPF on Tier-3 HDDVs, the plan has assisted EPA to enact “Regulations Governing Subsidies for Diesel Particulate Filter Installation on Heavy-Duty Diesel Vehicles” which announced on August 8 to implement the certification and subsidization of DPF.
As the age of Tier-1 and Tier-2 diesel vehicles have exceeded 17 years, it is too old to install filters or other anti-pollution equipment and should be eliminated. The plan has assisted EPA to enact “Regulations Governing Subsides for Eliminating Old Heavy-duty Diesel Vehicles”, and announced on August 16, 2017 to subsidize each of heavy-duty Tier-1 and Tier-2 diesel vehicles by NTD$30,000~400,000; until September 30, up to 3,353 of these vehicles have been scraped, and EPB has accepted 952 cases of subsidy applications.
For the purpose of keeping bettering the test quality of the correlation test of the inspection line of the diesel vehicles, the plan collects the most-frequent problems of correlation and repletion tests in recent years. At the same time, implementing the education ＆ training to share experience such as most-frequent dispute cases, protecting the rights of citizens, implementing the standard inspect procedures, instrument maintenance and quality control ＆ quality management of laboratories.
Finally, eliminating Tier-1 and Tier-2 HDDVs, and encouraging Tier-3 HDDVs to install DPF can reduce the emission of the original sources of PM2.5 by 5,638 tons. According to the simulation of EPA, the concentration of PM2.5 in air can be reduced by 1.7 μg/m3, which can obviously improve the air quality.
