With its Green City concept, the City of Frankfurt is pursuing a detailed and ambitious action plan for resource, climate and environmental protection. Waste management is a key element of the action plan. In its waste collection/separation system for residual waste, bio-waste and paper, FES [disposal service provider contracted by the city] is already making a significant contribution to the goal achievement. However, FES regards it as part of its mission to also rethink its collection process and search for alternative concepts.
Conventional garbage trucks run on diesel fuel and, should they be rejected by the city as a result of growing concern over air pollution problems, alternatives will then be needed. This renders the garbage truck an object of research for engineers at Frankfurt UAS.
In a pilot project to run just under three years, they are testing the potential of an innovative natural gas/electric hybrid vehicle [HA-Projekt 523/17-05] with the support of the Hessian Ministry of Economics, Energy, Transport and Housing [Hessischen Ministeriums für Wirtschaft, Energie, Verkehr und Wohnen]. In the first phase of the project, the Automotive Engineering Research Laboratory [Forschungslabor für Kraftfahrzeugtechnik] accompanied a conventional Euro VI diesel vehicle for several weeks on its tour through downtown Frankfurt. Both the pollutant emissions and fuel consumption were recorded using mobile exhaust gas measuring technology. This made it possible to determine the contribution of waste collection to inner-city pollution levels and to estimate the reduction potential. And the potential reduction is quite considerable since FES uses several million liters of diesel every year to keep the City of Frankfurt clean.
It is currently planned that the project’s findings will be applied to the entire FES fleet. In fact, the garbage truck being studied here is just one of 65 vehicles that collect household waste each day. Added to this are vehicles for other types of waste, with a total of up to 500,000 metric tons of waste disposed of annually in Frankfurt’s waste incineration plant.