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As you make your way around Orange County on your way to work, school or conducting your daily errands, it’s hard to miss the green Waste Management trucks. Serving more than 200,000 residential customers and approximately 15,000 commercial customers in nine cities and several unincorporated regions of the county, Waste Management of Orange County (WMOC) deploys 300 trucks throughout the week across all areas of the county.
Our drivers will be the first to tell you that this means a lot of time spent driving. But WMOC is proud that in addition to providing comprehensive services to our customers, we’re also taking steps to be considerate of the environment, not just with our waste and recycling services, but also with our vehicles.
Last summer, WMOC beat the California Air Resources Board (ARB) early deadline for retrofitting or retiring diesel trucks in order to reduce particulate emissions. We have reduced more than 21 tons per year of harmful air emissions from our fleet of garbage and recycling trucks through several different processes.
A total of 176 trucks, or 67 percent, from WMOC’s fleet have either been permanently retired, replaced with clean burning natural gas trucks or equipped with “best available control technologies” – special pollution controls such as oxidation catalysts or filters – to reduce harmful particulate emissions. The total reduction in air pollution includes cutting particulate emissions by an estimated three tons per year and smog-forming NOx (oxides of nitrogen) emissions by more than 18 tons per year. The NOx reduction is the equivalent of taking 2,305 new passenger cars off of the road.
We did this as part of the California ARB’s diesel emission reduction program, which originated in 1998. For one element of the program, the ARB created a schedule for all 1988 to 2002 model year trucks to be equipped with pollution controls, with a final deadline of December 31, 2007.
ARB also included an option to accelerate the compliance schedule, providing an early deadline of July 1, 2005, which requires that at least 50 percent of all 1988 to 2002 trucks be in compliance with the revised particulate emission guidelines. WMOC achieved a compliance rate of 67 percent in advance of July 1, and Waste Management has committed on a statewide level to complete the total emission reduction program well ahead of the state-mandated schedule. This is just one of the efforts we are engaged in for our mission of Keeping Orange County Clean – read about some of our other community and environmental efforts on our newly re-designed Web site, at www.wmorangecounty.com
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