Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-20-Speech-1-099"
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"en.20031020.7.1-099"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, the title of this report, which you, Mr President, have just read out, may be somewhat incomprehensible to the public. What, then, is this about? This is about the exhaust emissions from construction machinery, excavators, locomotives and inland waterway vessels, and I believe that it is clear to many members of the public that we have to do something about them. On a building site on a street in a European city, the position is that the excavator and the bulldozer are allowed to disgorge far more emission into the atmosphere than the lorry that takes away the rubble, even though they are equipped with the same engine. It simply defies explanation that the same engine, at the same location, but installed in two different machines, is allowed to produce different levels of emissions. It is clear, then, that we have to do something about this.
I am also very glad that it has been possible, even before first reading, to negotiate with the Council a compromise that was brought in jointly by the major political groups and with the support of many Members, with the ultimate objective of avoiding a conciliation procedure. This compromise goes some way towards what we decided in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy. We want to reduce the emissions from machines that are not road-going, and to do so in several stages. In so doing, we are in fact going down the same road as the United States, whose Environmental Protection Agency, as recently as April this year, submitted a proposal dealing with what is also our main concern – nitrogen oxides and particulate emissions – and indicating courses of action similar to the ones that we have discussed. This leads me to believe that this is the right way to go, as these machines are marketed around the world: several stages to reduce nitrogen oxides and particulates, with the result that, at the final stage, the incorporation of a particulate filter is an invariable requirement, enabling the substantial risk to health to be contained and the public, especially in urban agglomerations to be protected.
We are also including railway locomotives in this directive. Some of you may well have seen, when standing on a station, the quantity of particulates that a diesel shunting engine discharges into the atmosphere as it goes back and forth. This, I believe, is another area where we need to act, but we are proceeding more cautiously than with the other machines, in that we have incorporated a review process in order to ensure that technological solutions remain feasible.
The same applies to inland waterway vessels. I think this is an area in which we could have gone rather further, but there was no great momentum to do so – not because of technical considerations, but because of political considerations at Council level. We agreed to take care to ensure that engines cannot be electronically adjusted. We have seen how, as a result of electronic manipulation, the emission performance of some models of lorries in the United States was quite different under actual operating conditions to what it had been in the test cycle for type-approval. That possibility, too, will be excluded. We have agreed that performance once the test cycle is completed must not result in vastly greater emissions into the atmosphere, but that close attention must be paid to ensure that it remains within reasonable bounds in relation to the test cycle. I see us, today, as being able to take a significant step in the right direction.
We have also ensured that manufacturers who complete the stages early can use that as a selling point. I believe that, ultimately, customers will see that as a crucial factor in their decision to buy, so that they can say, ‘here are engines that adhere to emission standards that are not yet in force – that could be the machine for me’, and bringing them onto the market at an early stage could represent a sales opportunity for the manufacturers.
Overall, then, this is the right step to take and in the right direction. With it, we are following in the tradition of the many and varied pieces of legislation that we have adopted on cars, lorries, motorcycles, chain saws and lawnmowers. I believe that it can truly be said that we are writing another chapter in the success story of ‘Clean Air for Europe’. I thank all those who have helped in this."@en1
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