There's a new effort underway to reduce pollution in Durham. A number of the city's diesel vehicles have been fitted with emissions reduction equipment similar to that used to cut nitrogen oxide levels from power plants. Stephen Piccot is the Director of The Southern Research Institute and is in charge of the pilot project.
Stephen Piccot: "We actually installed the technologies on 12 garbage trucks and 4 backhoes and then we picked six of those vehicles to be as the most representative vehicles and we fully instrumented them with special monitoring systems that we have here that you can outfit onto the truck and have the truck operate in its normal use cycle."
Piccot says the Environmental Protection Agency wants a 65 percent reduction in emissions. He says right now, the technology is cutting nitrogen oxide levels by 28 to 78 percent in the test vehicles.
