Goodyear has announced that it has joined the EPA's Smartway Transport partnership. Smartway is a program aimed at reducing pollution from road freight transport and offers low-cost loans to make it easy for those in the truck industry to install fuel efficiency devices such as low-rolling resistance tires or to certify new vehicles as fuel-efficient. Goodyear also stated that its Fuel Max Line line of tires can reduce fuel consumption by four percent. By using these tires and other Smartway-certified components, Goodyear and EPA announced that a 18-wheeler can save up to 4,000 gallons of fuel per year.

Through SmartWay, the EPA aims to reduce between 3.3 and 6.6 billion gallons of diesel consumption and eliminate between 33 and 66 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions and up to 200,000 tons of nitrous oxide emissions per year by 2012.

[Source: Goodyear, EPA]

The EPA and Accion (a non-profit organisation in New York and New Jersey) have created a partnership to provide long-haul truckers with microloans with special conditions. The agreement comes under EPA's SmartWay program, which aims to reduce pollution generated by road freight.

With these microloans, truckers will be able to improve long-haul trucks by acquiring the SmartWay Upgrade Kit. What's in the kit? Well, ways to reduce idling, add low rolling resistance tires, move to advanced aerodynamics, and upgrade the truck's exhaust after-treatment devices. This will allow truckers to reduce emissions and spend less money on fuel. The microloans also helps drivers keep credit ratings intact.

Related:

• Wal-Mart gets ready to reduce emissions, waste and operating costs
• The Great American Trucking Show aknowledges biodiesel, fuel-saving initiatives in road freight transport
• Goodyear's greener tires pass EPA certification for SmartWay trucking
• AFVI Show: Diesel anti-idling technologies save money while you sleep

[Source: Accion]

We're not unfamiliar with the trouble with emissions spewing out of idling diesel vehicles here on AutoblogGreen, but I personally don't know much about what's being done on the technological side to halt this oh-so-common pollution source. So yesterday morning I headed over to the Rest Assured: Idle Reduction Technology Saves Money While You Sleep session at the AFVI Show and found out that there's a lot being done to make driving a truck (or school buses) a much cleaner business. A lot of this depends on new ways to power a truck cab when it's stopped, something that in the past have been accomplished by idling the huge diesel engine under the hood. Now, there are other ways to do this. Electricity-generating treadmills for overweight truckers were joked about, but they're not readily available.

Stacy Putnam, from ICF International, spoke about the EPA's SmartWay Transport Partnership. SmartWay is a voluntary partnership between freight industry companies and the EPA that was started in February 2004 with 15 charter partners. It now has over 500. When companies (mostly freight carriers but also logistics and shipping companies) join the partnership, they either agree to reduce their fuel use or to ships products with carriers that are trying to reduce fuel use. Through the Freight Logistics Environmental and Energy Tracking (FLEET) performance model, partner companies figure their current fuel use and set goals for future years. The new SmartWay model will incorporate using biodiesel and ethanol.

Read more after the jump.

There is most certainly an environmental trucker movement out there. Just ask Willie Nelson or Carl Cornelius. Sure, these biodiesel advocates can couch their arguments in terms of the American farmer or energy independence, but reduced CO2 emissions are reduced CO2 emissions. And the EPA knows it.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday paid attention to green trucking companies for their "superior environmental excellence" with an award ceremony today at the American Trucking Associations annual conference in Grapevine, Texas. The EPA and companies in the freight industry have partnered up in the SmartWay Transport Partnership. The Partnership is a way to reduce energy consumption through changing habits and by using new technologies. These technologies should be familiar to AutoblogGreen readers (low rolling resistance tires, reducing engine idling, etc.) and have helped the 450 companies in SmartWay save $1.2 billion in energy costs and stopped four million tons of CO2 from getting into the air we breathe. The EPA estimates that by 2012, annual reductions from the SmartWay program will be between 33 and 66 tons of emitted CO2.

A full list of companies receiving the EPA awards can be found here.

[Source: EPA]

A new Green Collection of cars from Hertz will feature vehicles with fuel economy ratings of 28mpg or better. Included in the 35,000-car collection will be the Toyota Camry, Ford Fusion, Buick LaCrosse and Hyundai Sonata. Many of the vehicles also carry EPA SmartWay certification, indicating lower emissions of polluntants and greenhouse gasses. The vehicles can be reserved by specific make and model.

Hertz officials say they're reaching out to specific customer segments with the program. The company already has the Prestige and Fun collections. All can be reserved at 50 major airports throughout the country. More locations will be added.

[Source: Hertz]