The Progressive Conservative government is gearing up to slash commercial truck emissions next year in a bid to reduce air pollution on Ontario highways.

Premier Doug Ford announced earlier this fall that mandatory Drive Clean auto emissions tests for passenger vehicles would be eliminated as of April 1.

Instead, Ford will focus anti-pollution efforts on heavy-duty vehicles such as diesel trucks.

That’s good news for dynaCERT, a Toronto high-tech firm that’s invented a device that reduces nitrogen oxides emissions by 88 per cent while cutting fuel consumption by 19 per cent.

“We have a very unique system that produces pure hydrogen and pure oxygen on demand and it feeds it to the intake. By doing that we are enabling the engine to get full performance out of its fuel,” dynaCERT CEO Jim Payne said in an interview Tuesday.

“It is making the engine more efficient; it is making the engine burn much more efficiently,” Payne said while on business in Munich, where the company’s technology is already in use on German autobahns as well as here in Ontario, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Austria, India, and Bangladesh.

“We are getting great fuel results and we are also reducing emissions,” he said, noting the $8,000 HydraGEN device, the size of carry-on suitcase, should pay for itself in diesel savings within a year.

One installed on a truck and trailer would save 4,800 litres of diesel annually, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 100 tonnes, the equivalent of removing 28 Honda Civic sedans from the road.

It also works on school buses, construction machinery, and other big-polluting commercial vehicles.

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Payne, whose firm employs 50 people in Toronto and spent $35 million developing its technology, is hopeful the Ontario government will introduce a “certification” program to encourage the usage of such devices by trucking companies.

With other companies around the world developing similar technology, a certification system would ensure buyers that the devices actually remove pollutants from the air.

Transportation Minister Jeff Yurek said officials in his department are hard at work on the new commercial Drive Clean program.

“Obviously the goals are to ensure that we have cleaner running vehicles on the road so we can decrease our environmental footprint with the trucking industry,” said Yurek.

“We’re still working on everything right now. It’s a little early to have details for it. We’ll come forward with a good plan of action,” the minister said.

“We’re bringing relief to average drivers by scrapping the Drive Clean program. It worked. It cleaned up the cars in the system and we hope to do the same with the trucks,” he said.

Environment Minister Rod Phillips said the PC government welcomes new initiatives from the private sector.

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“We’re putting in place a program where there will be a crackdown on ... truck emissions. So any ideas and suggestions along those lines will be important,” said Phillips.

“The government’s role, of course, is going to be around enforcement and making sure that we are doing spot checks and (imposing) a much tough standard,” the minister said.

“We’ve been very encouraged that the Ontario Trucking Association has been participating openly. Good truckers don’t want to pollute and they want to make sure that there’s protections put in place. We’ll be enforcing against the bad ones,” he said.

Robert Benzie is the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie

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