January 2018

Road sweepers: New EUnited PM-Test for PM2.5/10 certified for a clean environment

Click here for full press release (in Englsh and German)

EUnited will introduce a new certification for PM10 and PM2.5 for road sweepers at IFAT 2018.

The addition of PM2.5 to PM10 will be demonstrated by a new design of the EUnited PM-Test label. This new label will be presented at IFAT 2018 for the first time.

With this new label, additional common criteria and levels will be introduced for PM2.5 and PM10. Therefore, the new maximum achievable level in the future will be 4 Stars. Today up to three stars on the current label show how much a sweeper positively exceeds the test requirements.

The EUnited PM test has been the undisputed European reference for the assessment of the fine particulate behaviour of road sweepers for several years. However, the current EUnited PM certificate refers only to PM10 due to the market requests driven by European legislation. Through the European Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC, cities and municipalities must ensure that emission limit values for fine particles are only exceeded on a limited number of days per year. This directive has required a limit value for the exposure concentration of PM10 since 2005. From the Beginning of 2015, member states have had to ensure that concentrations of PM2,5 in ambient air do not exceed a specific limit value. This limit will be further reduced in 2020. Therefore, more and more customers have asked for a validation of the PM2.5 absorption performance for sweepers in addition to PM10.

The European sweeper manufacturers in EUnited responded to this demand and together began to modify the test procedure and started to test the PM2.5 absorption performance of their sweepers with the target of testing all current sweeper models available on the European market by IFAT 2018.