Environmental Initiative, along with some partnering organizations, is expanding its work to make Minnesota's vehicles cleaner, safer and more energy efficient.
This latest work comes 15 years after the same partners retrofitted the first of 4,500 diesel school buses, trucks and off-road equipment as part of what Environmental Initiative called Project Green Fleet.
Environmental Initiative, or EI, is financed by Flint Hills Resources with support from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and the city of Minneapolis. The group has now launched Project CAR (Clean Air Repairs) with designs on fixing older passenger cars, trucks and vans that cause 90% of vehicle emissions.
Last week, technicians worked on several vehicles of working-poor customers of the Lift Garage on E. Lake Street in Minneapolis that need tires, batteries, fluid changes and the like. The owners were cleared based on financial need to get additional pollution-control work through Project CAR.
"Our customers will pay $500 on average for tires, brakes, batteries or other critical repairs so they can get to work," said JoHanna Smrcina, operations director at the Lift. "Now we can say, you also need a catalytic converter or oxygen sensor and Project CAR will pay."
Only about 70 cars have gotten the Project CAR pollution-remediation treatment so far this year in a slow ramp-up. If past is precedent, this matters.
Project Green Fleet, which similarly started small, has retrofitted 3,200 school buses with emissions-depleting equipment, said Gillian Greenberg, a project coordinator at EI. That has allowed 300,000 school kids to breathe cleaner air and reduced asthma and other illnesses.
What's more, 1,400 heavy-duty diesel engines in trucks, buses and off-road equipment were retrofitted. That equals removing 750,000 cars from state roads.