Abstract
The diffuse nature of road transport and the heterogeneity of heavy vehicles have hindered the implementation of emissions accounting systems. Even though there are emission factors in well-known databases, these factors have commonly been designed in industrialized countries, which might have geography, type of roads, and operating conditions different to other countries. This paper proposes a method for the energy consumption and emissions estimation based on vehicle operating conditions in regions with different topology, such as Colombia, Malaysia, and Spain, as case studies. Moreover, the environmental impacts of fuel production in each country are calculated. The diesel consumption on mountainous roads for a full loaded rigid truck in Colombia was 45 L/100 km, compared to averages between 22–26 L/100 km from other sources usually applied. In contrast, the diesel consumption for an articulated truck on a hilly road in Spain from both the proposed method and generic databases coincided in 31 L/100 km. The vehicle speed, load, and road gradient also generated large variations up to 145% in the air pollutants’ estimation. This study contributes to the need for more research about emission factors and tools that facilitate and reduce uncertainty in the environmental accounting in freight companies in different geographies.
Highlights
Despite the fact that sustainable development has been considered a topic of interest since the 1980s [1,2], the transport sector has been one of the last sectors to develop relevant initiatives aimed at optimizing its operations from the environmental perspective
Companies can calculate the carbon footprint of the transported products as well as analyze the different environmental impacts related to the operation of the vehicle and the corresponding fuel used for a specific route
The diesel consumption for an articulated truck on a hilly motorway in Spain from both the proposed method and generic factors coincided at 31 L/100 km, because this route has similar characteristics to the average European road type and driving conditions
Summary
Despite the fact that sustainable development has been considered a topic of interest since the 1980s [1,2], the transport sector has been one of the last sectors to develop relevant initiatives aimed at optimizing its operations from the environmental perspective. Taking Europe as an example, while all sectors reduced a quarter of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between 1990 and 2009, the transport sector increased almost a third of its emissions in the same period [5]. This was mainly due to the increase in the domestic truck traffic, which despite representing only 3% of the vehicle fleet in the European Union (EU), produces almost a quarter of the total CO2 emissions generated by the road transport sector [6]. Some projections have suggested that under this perspective, without the intervention of governments, GHG emissions produced by trucks will be, with respect to the 1990 levels, around 35% higher for the years, 2030 and 2050 [8]
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