Government regulations and competition among automakers since the 1960s have made the typical automobile safer and cleaner, in wealthier and poorer states alike. Governments across the First World began passing legislation in the 1960s and 1970s to establish standards for air pollution and auto emissions. California has been a leader in this regard since 1966, when it set the world’s first standards for carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons from automobile tailpipes. It has progressively strengthened regulations for automobile emissions, a trend seen in other jurisdictions in North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and, to a lesser extent, in developing countries as well. Over this time, governments have also passed laws and set up programs to make roads and cars safer by, for example, requiring seat belts, enforcing speed limits, and mandating infant or child car seats. Again, as with regulations and laws to protect the environment, those for traffic and vehicular safety are more far-reaching and better enforced in the First World than in the Third World.
To meet stricter regulatory standards and jockey for markets, auto-makers have been upgrading new models with environmental technologies like catalytic converters and fuel injection systems as well as with safety features like antilock brakes, safety glass, and air bags. Because older or badly maintained automobiles account for much of vehicle emissions overall, governments have in turn encouraged consumers to maintain their older cars and trucks or trade them in for newer ones. Some have worked with automakers to improve the recycling of junked vehicles, having reasonable success in the First World with materials that are easier to recycle, such as iron and steel, and less success everywhere with materials that are harder to recycle, such as plastic and “fluff” (hazardous residue from shredding a vehicle). Even here, however, governments in Europe and Japan are now beginning to improve recycling rates by making automakers responsible for recycling, which motivates them to design vehicles with cost-effective recycling in mind, such as labeling plastic components with content codes.
As a result of these regulations and technologies, and as this chapter documents, the shadow effects of individual automobiles on the lives of people and on the quality of ecosystems have been declining steadily for half a century. A typical new passenger car in the United States, for example, is far less polluting than a 1960s model. Traffic fatalities per driver and per mile driven have been falling across the developed world since the 1960s as well.
Such progress shows how domestic legislation and corporate advances can combine to improve the environmental performance of consumer goods and how trade and investment can then transfer these improved products into jurisdictions with lower environmental regulations. That said, such progress has not, as chapter 5 will argue, kept the ecological shadow of automobiles as a whole from intensifying and shifting into ecosystems and onto people less able to resist or adapt.
Regulating Traffic in the First World
Governmental and corporate efforts in the First World to improve the environmental performance of automobiles gathered momentum from the 1950s to the 1970s. The U.S. federal government, for example, gradually strengthened air quality legislation, passing first the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 and then the Clean Air Acts of 1963 and 1970, which set new standards and provided more funding for research on air pollution.1 Many other developed countries—Japan, Britain, Germany, Canada, and Australia, to name just a few—also took regulatory steps to improve the environmental performance of vehicles in the 1970s, aided by the quadrupling of oil prices, which created a sudden global demand for more fuel-efficient cars. Because the “use phase” accounts for nearly 90 percent of a motor vehicle’s consumption of energy during its life cycle, advances in its environmental performance are crucial for energy conservation.2
California has played a leading role in raising the bar for environmental standards for automobiles not only in the United States but also in Europe and Japan. By the early 1960s, California was requiring the use of positive crankcase ventilation, a technology to control hydrocarbon emissions. In 1966, it became the world’s first jurisdiction to set standards for automobile tailpipe emissions for carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons; that year, the California Highway Patrol began random roadside inspections of smog control devices. Three years later, California became the first U.S. state to pass ambient air quality standards for total suspended particulates, nitrogen dioxide, photochemical oxidants, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide. And, in 1971, it became the first state to set automobile nitrogen oxide standards.
Over the next four decades, California continued to strengthen automobile regulations. The California Smog Check Program went into effect in 1984, mandating inspection of automobile emission control systems every two years. In 1988, California passed regulations requiring onboard computers to monitor emission performance by the model year 1994. In the 1990s, it enacted legislation to require cleaner diesel fuel and phase in cleaner-burning gasoline, and, in 2001, it set new standards to reduce diesel soot and smog-forming emissions by 90 percent from large diesel engines, such as those in big rig trucks, by the model year 2007.3
Although the regulatory changes have created incentives for automakers to research, design, and market cars with better environmental technologies, as some firms have seen potential competitive advantages in them, the advances themselves have lowered resistance to the new rules. Because the advances are too extensive to review fully, the next section touches on just two of the most notable ones—the catalytic converter and fuel injection.
Catalytic converters, which scrub automobile exhaust of pollutants causing smog, first appeared on new vehicles in the early 1970s. These spread quickly through the North American and Japanese markets. (Most of Europe didn’t widely adopt catalytic converters until the early 1990s.) After the mid-1970s, nearly all new cars sold in the United States had catalytic converters. Automakers began to compete to install more effective converters. By 1977, Volvo was marketing a car as “smog-free”—with the first three-way catalytic converter to control hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide. By the early 1980s, more efficient catalytic converters were enabling some U.S. firms to exceed some federal emission standards to reduce smog.4
Fuel injection improves fuel efficiency, lowers emissions, and increases the power of gasoline engines. Since fuel injection systems first appeared in the 1950s, auto firms have been steadily perfecting them, introducing electronic fuel injection in 1967, which significantly improved environmental performance. Fuel injection was common on automobiles in Europe by the 1980s and standard on new models in the United States by 1990. (The 1990 Subaru Justy was the last model sold in the United States with a carburetor.)
Rising Emission Standards: California as Exemplar
Stronger regulations and better technologies like the catalytic converter and fuel injection have steadily decreased the environmental impact of individual automobiles in most developed countries over the last four decades. A typical new automobile in the United States, for example, is over 95 percent less polluting for emissions such as nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, and hydrocarbons than one sold in the 1960s.5 Such progress has, in some cases, allowed the net ecological impact of automobiles to decline even when the number of vehicles on the road is rising rapidly. The data from California are especially impressive. In 1970, there were just over 12 million registered motor vehicles in California; annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) totaled 110 billion. The average emission of nitrogen oxides per vehicle was 5.3 grams per mile; for hydrocarbons, it was 8.6 grams per mile. The vehicle emissions for nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons were nearly 1.5 million metric tons per year.
A decade later, with stricter emission regulations and better environ-mental technologies for vehicles, the average emission of nitrogen oxides per vehicle was down to 4.8 grams per mile, while, for hydrocarbons, it was down to 5.5 grams per mile. Total vehicle emissions for nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons remained at the 1970 level even though there were now five million more vehicles with 45 billion more vehicle miles traveled. By 1990, 23 million vehicles were registered in California; vehicle miles traveled in that year totaled 242 billion. The average emission of nitrogen oxides per vehicle had fallen to 3.0 grams per mile; for hydrocarbons, it was 2.7 grams per mile. Total vehicle emissions for nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons were down about 200,000 metric tons per year from the 1980 level despite an increase of 87 billion vehicle miles traveled; they would continue to decline over the next decade even as the total number of cars continued to climb.
By 1995, the average emission of nitrogen oxides per vehicle was down to 2.2 grams per mile, while the average emission of hydrocarbons was down to 1.8 grams per mile. The total annual amount of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons from auto emissions in 1995 was approximately 1 million metric tons, one-third less than the 1970 level even though total vehicle miles traveled were 146 percent higher. (The 26 million registered vehicles traveled a total of 271 billion miles in 1995.)
Five years later, the California averages for emissions of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons were again down, although just by a fraction this time—another 0.1 grams per mile for nitrogen oxides and 0.2 grams per mile for hydrocarbons. Total vehicle emissions for nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons rose somewhat—to around 1.1 million metric tons per year—with vehicle miles traveled rising to 280 billion per year. This higher cumulative figure for 2000, however, is still around 200,000 metric tons per year less than in 1990 and 400,000 metric tons per year less than in 1970.6
Other cities in the First World, even ones with reasonable air quality, are following leaders like California to raise vehicle emissions standards. In Vancouver, for example, a program called “Air Care” to test whether light-duty vehicles meet minimum standards for tailpipe emissions of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides decreased harmful vehicle emissions by 35 percent from 1992 to 2002. Cleaner fuels and new vehicle technologies lowered emissions by another 31 percent over this same period. It’s reasonable to expect air quality in Vancouver to continue to improve, in part because Canada as a whole began phasing in even stricter emission standards for new vehicles in 2004, aligning Canadian emission standards with American ones. These will eventually reduce allowable emission levels by up to 95 percent. Canada has been taking steps to ensure cleaner gasoline, too. Regulations now prohibit the sale of gasoline with more than 1 percent benzene (by volume) and require that it have an average sulfur concentration of no more than 30 milligrams per kilogram (about 38 milligrams per U.S. gallon).7
Governments in First World countries such as Canada are also providing incentives for owners to trade in old vehicles, a logical way to further lower emissions in Canada where older or poorly maintained vehicles (which comprise 10-15 percent of the vehicle fleet) account for up to 50 percent of total vehicle emissions. On the other hand, trading in older vehicles adds to a growing challenge for all states: how to safely dispose of car parts and effectively recycle them.
Some governments, like Japan’s, are imposing new regulations to increase recycling rates for automobiles. Japan’s current recovery and recycling rate for vehicles is between 75 and 85 percent of total weight.The government aims to raise this to 95 percent by 2015. The European Commission, under its end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) directive, is now requiring manufacturers and importers to set up scrap yards to take back, “de-pollute,” and recycle used vehicles bearing its logo. Around 14 million vehicles reach the “end of life” in the European Union (EU) each year. The ELVs directive aims to establish rules and create incentives so that manufacturers design cars with recycling in mind. Provisions thus require automakers to code parts and materials and to provide dismantling information. Like Japan, EU member states are seeking to reuse, recover, and recycle 95 percent of vehicle weight by 2015.8 They’re seeking as well to solve the problem of owners simply abandoning old vehicles rather than paying for their disposal.
The auto-recycling industry in North America, like the one in Japan, recovers between 75 and 85 percent of the total vehicle weight. And, as in Europe and Japan, most of this is iron and steel. The steel-recycling rate for cars in the United States—calculated by comparing the annual amount recycled with the annual amount used to manufacture new vehicles—was well over 90 percent even in the 1990s. Today, recyclers are retrieving slightly more steel from scrapped vehicles than manufacturers are using for new vehicles (in part because some newer cars contain less steel). Not all of this recycled steel goes back into car manufacturing. Indeed, only about one-quarter of the steel in new car bodies is recycled steel, although the proportion is higher for internal steel parts.9
Automobiles are one of the world’s most recycled commodities, with 95 percent of vehicles in North America and Europe ending up with dismantlers and shredders. Dismantlers will salvage parts in decent condition, including engines, tires, batteries, fuel, catalytic converters, and air bags, but much of their efforts are focused on recovering steel, a relatively easy process. In contrast, recycling fluids in radiators, brake systems, and transmissions or toxic metals like mercury, lead, and cadmium is both expensive and laborious, as is recycling nonmetallic car parts made from rubber, glass, or plastic. Metallic car parts account for between 70 and 75 percent of a typical vehicle’s weight. Of the nonmetallic parts, tires and elastomers constitute about one-quarter, plastics around one-third, and glass about 13 percent.10
The proportion of plastic in cars, in everything from bumpers to door lining to contoured upholstery, has been steadily rising for decades. It’s light, cheap, and flexible, increasing fuel efficiency and design possibilities. Plastic climbed from 0.6 percent of vehicle weight in 1960 to 7.5 percent in 2000. This may not seem like much, but it’s equal to 4.3 billion pounds of plastic per year in the United States alone.11 The recycling of plastic car parts, however, though gradually increasing in developed countries, lags far behind the recycling of steel.
Dismantlers in the United States, for example, still manage to retrieve only a small fraction of the plastic in automobiles. This generally becomes shredder residue or “fluff”—a mixture of plastics, rubber, glass, paints, dirt, oils, and miscellaneous pieces left over after a giant magnet extracts metals from the crushed vehicle hulk. Shredder fluff is considered hazardous waste by the international community and many national governments because of the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other hazardous substances it can contain.
The United States produces about 5 million metric tons of this fluff every year. Most of it ends up in landfills or incinerators. One reason for the low rates of recycling car plastics is the expense and difficulty of sorting and processing the more than 20 types of plastic in an average vehicle, and the even greater difficulty of doing so for older vehicles whose plastic parts are not stamped with their composition and grade. Another reason is the technical difficulty of recycling small amounts of low-grade plastic waste. And a third, perhaps most important, reason is the lack of strong markets for recycled car plastics and shredder residue.12
A few scientists are investigating imaginative solutions to reduce plastic waste. One novel idea is to make plastic car parts that will biodegrade upon disposal. In this regard, the Ecology Center, an American NGO advocating for clean air, safe water, and healthy communities, rates Toyota as the “clear sustainable plastics leader”—well ahead of Honda, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, Nissan, and General Motors. Toyota is developing biodegradable plastics from renewable materials such as corn and sugarcane and working to eliminate polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a common plastic that releases toxic chemicals such as dioxins, furans, and PCBs, from its vehicles.13
Regulating Traffic Safety in the First World
Not only vehicles but also drivers and passengers in developed countries have become much safer over the last 30 years. There are a host of reasons for this. Activists such as consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who wrote the 1965 bestseller Unsafe at Any Speed, raised public awareness of the need for higher safety standards within developed countries. Many governments passed new laws to establish baseline standards, such as the U.S. National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. Many began to design and maintain safer roads; some put in place speed bumps and more appropriate speed limits and began to enforce penalties for speeding and drunk driving. Some governments also began to require that automakers equip their vehicles with safety features. One of the first and most successful was the seat belt.
Although a few physicians put lap belts in their own cars and called for them in all new cars as far back as the 1930s, it wasn’t until the 1950s that auto manufacturers, including Ford, Chrysler, and Volvo, first included belts in some models. These became increasingly common—and more elaborate—in the 1960s. Some jurisdictions, like the Australian states of Victoria and South Australia in 1964, began to require front seat belt anchorages on new cars. Victoria was the first to pass a law on mandatory use of restraints in 1971; that year, the number of traffic fatalities among passengers and drivers in the state fell by 18 percent.
Soon others followed Victoria’s lead. By 1972, all Australian states required seat belt use, as did New Zealand and West Germany. Yet, for a long time, many did not. The United Kingdom, for instance, didn’t require front seat belt use until 1983. Under the new law, front seat belt use went up 58 percent—from 37 to 95 percent—while hospital admissions for traffic injuries went down 35 percent.14 Today, most governments in the First World require seat belts. Numerous studies show this saves many lives, reducing traffic fatalities among drivers and front seat passengers by 40-65 percent.
Many other advances have made cars and trucks safer, too. The drum brakes of 50 years ago could require 100 pounds of pedal force to work when hot. Power brakes, common by the late 1950s, require far less pedal force no matter their temperature. Split-brake systems, which retain partial braking power even in the event of a leaking brake line, first appeared in the early 1960s and were mandated by some nations, such as the United States, by the late 1960s. Today, technologies like the antilock braking system (ABS) are even more effective and reliable.
Other safety features, such as air bags, child or infant car seats, and safety glass, are also reducing fatalities from traffic collisions. Wind-shields that would break without shattering appeared in 1953, although they could still be deadly if a person’s head crashed through them. The first “high-penetration-resistant” windshields appeared in 1965; just three years later, the United States required these on all cars. Air bags first appeared in the mid-1970s. By 1999, the United States required dual air bags on all new passenger vehicles. These safety features significantly reduce the chances of dying in a traffic collision. Studies show, for example, that air bags can reduce driver deaths by 22-29 percent in front-end crashes, while safety car seats can lower infant deaths in car crashes by 71 percent and small child deaths by 54 percent.15
In the latest wave of safety features, automakers are developing “intelligent” vehicles with new safety technologies that range from the simple (audible seat belt and speed reminders) to the sophisticated (automatic notification systems to alert emergency crews after a crash). The near future could well see cars with radar-equipped computers able to over-ride drivers and avoid collisions by directing their vehicles to swerve and brake.
Four out of ten Americans polled by the Associated Press in 2003 thought that it was safer to ride in an SUV than in a car. The tendency of SUVs to roll over, however, can make these vehicles as dangerous as cars for the driver and passengers—or more so. Thus, in the United States, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration calculated that, for 2001, occupants in SUVs were 3 percent more likely to die in a collision than occupants in cars (162 deaths per million SUVs versus 157 deaths per million for cars); three years later, the Department of Transportation calculated that figure at nearly 11 percent.
The evidence that SUVs increase the risk of death for other drivers of cars is even stronger. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that when an SUV, rather than an ordinary car, hits the driver’s side of a car, the other driver is almost 5 times more likely to die.16
That said, a few basic statistics on traffic fatalities clearly show that traffic conditions in developed countries are safer overall, even after discounting for higher survival rates from better medical and emergency care.
A Safer Drive in the First World
Traffic fatalities in the United States fell from more than 25 per 100,000 in 1966 to 15 per 100,000 in 2000; those in the United Kingdom fell from 15 per 100,000 in 1966 to around 6 per 100,000 in 2002; and those in Australia, from 30 per 100,000 in 1970 to fewer than 10 per 100,000 in 2001. Drivers and passengers are also much safer over longer distances. A person’s chances of dying in a vehicle in the United States, for example, were over four times higher per mile driven in 1953 than they are today.17
On balance, then, the conclusion is clear: the modern automobile is much safer and contains better environmental technologies. Such changes certainly benefit consumers and advance environmental management. Yet, as chapter 5 will show, rising numbers of cars and light trucks on the roads of the developing world are overwhelming the benefits of better-made vehicles.