Greener West Midlands buses clean up region’s air

National Express West Midlands engineers have been doing pioneering work to clean up the region’s air.

The bus company has fitted new green technology into hundreds of its older buses to catch harmful particulates and NOx gases.

It takes a team of two engineers around six hours to fit a filter and a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) “trap” with AdBlue injection to each bus.

When they’ve finished, the harmful emissions coming out of the exhaust are reduced by as much as 96%, making the air coming out of the exhaust cleaner than the air in the city outside.

You can see how it’s done in this video. https://youtu.be/dRy0iKktUMg

National Express West Midlands Managing Director, Tom Stables, said: “Travelling by bus is a much healthier way to move people around than using private cars.

“A bus engine is only four times bigger than a car engine but a bus can carry 75 people inside – taking about 50 cars off the road.

“We have nearly 1600 buses servicing the West Midlands. We are working closely with bus manufacturers, central government and Birmingham City Council to explore all the new technology that’s becoming available to make our vehicles even cleaner and greener.

“All the new buses we’ve bought for the last two years have had the greenest engines on the market.

“What with these new buses, and retrofitting the older ones, 60% of our fleet now operates to the two highest European emission standards – making the air in the West Midlands cleaner and healthier.”