Social pressures and growing environmental consciousness have induced companies to improve their environmental performance beyond regulatory requirements. However, that is not the case in the highly-polluting U.S. heavy-duty diesel trucking industry.
According to a study published in Regulation & Governance, trucking companies are not legally obligated to use best pollution control technologies. This, coupled with weak social scrutiny, means that environmental consciousness is limited in the industry.
Trucking companies in certain niche markets have improved environmental performance by purchasing expensive “greener” trucks and adopting maintenance measures to prevent breakdowns and reduce fuel costs – which, in turn, reduce dangerous diesel emissions.
“Environmentally-friendly actions undertaken by trucking companies are most often by-products of economic reasons, such as avoiding cost of repair, late delivery penalties, customer complaints about reliability, and rising prices for fuel,” says co-author, Professor Robert A. Kagan from the University of California, Berkeley.
See full Press Release.
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