By Rohan Abeywardena
The promised tightening of vehicle emission standards in the country by middle of this year might not be imposed for quite some time to come, according to those in the know.
They charged that even the existing basic standards are not properly enforced because of the failure of the Motor Traffic Department to put in place its independent Vehicle Testing Monitoring Unit even nearly three years after the vehicle emission testing scheme was introduced. Though the Department had made a mockery of the testing programme, it had permitted the two companies given exclusive rights to carry out the tests to increase their fees early this year as per the set formula.
In terms of enhanced testing standards, already gazetted, the permitted emission levels for petrol vehicles should be tightened from the current 4.5 per cent Carbon Monoxide and 1200 parts per million Hydrocarbon to 3.0 CO to 1,000 HC, for petrol motor cycles and motor tricycles from 6.0 CO and 9,000 HC to 4.0 CO and 6,000 HC and in the case of diesel vehicles smoke opacity from current 8.0 to 4.0.
Sources, however said one of the major reasons for the Environment Ministry to drag its feet over the issue is that if the new standards were introduced nearly half the vehicles in use by government institutions would fail because of their poor condition. The solution was to replace such ageing vehicles with new ones at the rate of 1000 new vehicles per year, beginning with the current year.
It has already been reported that even under existing standards about 35 per cent of the state owned vehicles have failed the test.
Since the new regulations are already gazetted we attempted to contact both the Environment Minister Anura Priyadharshana Yapa and the Ministry Secretary R.H.S Samaratunga several times yesterday to find out when the regulations would implemented, but we had no success.
The Island learns that the inability of the Petroleum Corporation to refine super grade diesel at its ageing refinery too is a problem when imposing tough emission standards.
http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=37106
No comments:
Post a Comment