In Massachusetts alone, particulate-heavy diesel pollution helps cause 450 premature deaths, 700 heart attacks, 9,900 asthma attacks, and 60,000 missed work days every year, according to the Diesel Pollution Solution Coalition, a Boston-based environmental group. A bill before the state legislature would attack that problem by requiring all heavy-duty diesel vehicles owned, operated, or contracted by the state government to be retrofitted with the “best available” technology to reduce particulate emissions by the end of 2010.
Woburn-based GEO2 Technologies hopes to be one of the companies supplying such technology, and the company announced today that its microfiber-based diesel filters have passed an important environmental certification test in Switzerland, which could help pave the way for the company to sell the devices here and abroad. The VERT Filter Test, administered by the Swiss clean air authority and the occupational health administrations of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, is recognized by a growing number of environmental agencies as a standard for evaluating the effectiveness of diesel filters. According to GEO2, its filters captured 99.95 percent of diesel soot in the governments’ lab tests, meaning that they’ve earned VERT “Phase One” approval.
“By passing Phase One, GEO2 filters have demonstrated superior efficacy under rigorous testing conditions,” GEO2’s president and CEO Rob Lachenauer said in a statement. “As we’ve found, traditional filters currently on the market are big, heavy and expensive, which limits the pace of clean diesel adoption. GEO2 has created the first filtering media for retrofit diesel emissions control applications that meets both diesel emissions and operator’s fuel efficiency needs quickly, cost-efficiently and in a commercially viable way.”
Bilal Zuberi, GEO2’s vice president of product development (pictured above), said that passing the VERT Phase One test indicates that “there are no secondary toxic emissions in our system.” Zuberi said the company would release the results formally in a technical publication.
