Richard Lofthouse: “Only 10% of vehicles comply with the European regulations on nitrogen dioxide emissions.”
Shortly after being implemented in Central Madrid, today, the capital holds a new Naturgy Foundation seminar where experts in the institutional, university and business fields gather to highlight that air quality and control of emissions remain key factors in the design of urban mobility.
“The local authorities need a ‘contamination measure’ that is better than the current EURO 6+ regulation.” That was the resounding opinion given by Richard Lofthouse, senior researcher for Emissions Analytics, a British company specialising in testing and analysing data from portable systems of measuring emissions, in Madrid today. Lofthouse made these claims at a seminar on ‘Etiquetaje ambiental de vehículos y gestión de la contaminación urbana’ (Environmental labelling of vehicles and management of urban pollution), which was organised by the Naturgy Foundation in their Madrid office this morning. It took place just weeks after the sanctioning period of the low emissions area in Central Madrid was implemented.
Lofthouse explained the AIR Index, a new index that helps both the government and the citizens better understand vehicle emissions. It is a simple classification using colour coding that shows the difference between clean and dirty vehicles, created by testing vehicles on the road.
“How many vehicles comply with the Euro6 regulation on nitrogen dioxide (NO2)?” asked Lofthouse. “Very few, about 10%. The other vehicles exceed it by a lot,” he said.
The AIR Index is based on “the CEN CWA17379 regulation, published in January this year, which is a voluntary European standard procedure created in the framework of the European Committee for Standardization.” The organisation behind this regulation is the not-for-profit alliance Allow AIR (Allow Independent Road Testing).
Andrés Alastuey, professor and researcher at CSIC, agreed with Lofthouse that the Euro6 regulation has had a positive impact on reducing contaminating particles, “but it has not reduced nitrogen dioxide emissions in the same way”, which is one of the main contaminants at local level together with the particles.
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