China issued new emissions guidelines for diesel vehicles to improve air quality. Forklift manufacturers had to act immediately and offer more environmentally friendly models. The KION brand Baoli was prepared.
The scope is breath-taking, literally: Every day, over 50 million pieces of non-road diesel machinery are busy working to build China’s economy. And every year, around 2 million new pieces of non-road diesel machinery join this force. Among the newly added machines, almost one in ten, or 160,000, are diesel forklifts. Non-road diesel machines consume over 100 million tons of diesel fuel each year, equal to 20 per cent of China´s total consumption, and emit over 2 million tons of nitrogen oxide.
In order to further control pollution emissions from non-road diesel machinery, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection announced in January 2016 that, beginning 1 April 2016, no non-road mobile diesel machinery (except farm equipment) could be manufactured, imported or sold if equipped with diesel engines that do not comply with the Stage III requirements of China’s Non-road Emission Standards. From 1 December of this year on, no agricultural machinery can be manufactured, imported or sold if equipped with diesel engines that do not comply with the new requirements.
For China’s forklift makers, whether domestic or foreign-owned, the release of the new standards meant that, beginning 1 April 2016, the diesel forklifts they produce, import and sell would all have to be equipped with engines that comply with the new emission standards which are equivalent to European IIIA emission standards. In the view of Zhang Jie, Secretary-General of the China Industrial Truck Association (CITA), these changes were imperative: “First and foremost, implementing the new standards will help improve air quality, and secondly, it will help winnow out the older models, achieving a major upgrade and generational succession within the forklift fleet. Using new highly efficient, low-emission, more environmentally friendly models to satisfy the demands of customers has become the trend in the industry’s development.”
