Ann Arbor, Clean Energy Coalition deploy new hydraulic hybrid trucks

The city of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti’s Clean Energy Coalition have partnered to make Tree Town’s newest green toy (single-stream recycling) a little more sustainable.The Depot Town-based non-profit is using some of its federal grant money to outfit four of the city’s trucks with a fuel-saving hybrid technology. Those trucks will be the first to collect Ann Arbor’s newly established single stream of recycling, a process where residents put all of their recyclables in a single container.”It represents a large amount of fuel savings,” says Lisa Warshaw, a spokeswoman for the Clean Energy Coalition. “It’s also a reduction in vehicle emissions.”The project is funded with approximately $120,000 from the federal stimulus to purchase four hydraulic hybrid trucks, which utilize technology pioneered by the EPA’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory in Ann Arbor. That technology stores braking energy in hydraulic fluid instead of in a battery pack. It’s designed for heavy-duty trucks that do a lot of stop-and-go driving.”I was kind of awestruck by this technology,” Warshaw says. “I would like to see this technology distributed to more sectors of the transportation system.”Source: Lisa Warshaw, a spokeswoman for the Clean Energy CoalitionWriter: Jon Zemke