We recently talked with Kris Kiser, the president and CEO of the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, about various issues in today’s professional lawn care landscape. Seemingly, one of the biggest issues in the industry revolves around CARB compliance. The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, acts as the governmental “clean air agency,” not just for the state of California, but seemingly federally as well.
Under the federal Clean Air Act, CARB also issues emissions standards for all engines. Everything that gets mandated for automobile emissions standards affects the OPE industry as well. Because these standards have a way of evolving, sometimes erratically, CARB compliance can become a difficult issue to navigate both for the manufacturer and the end user.
CARB Compliance in Manufacturing
For instance, in 2007, the government laid down the renewable fuel standard that requires that gasoline contain a certain percentage of ethanol fuel. While it used to be that whatever you put into your truck, you could also put into your OPE, this probably shouldn’t be the case anymore. Gasoline stayed relatively stable for much longer periods of time, but ethanol fuel will absorb water and wreak havoc on small engines. And if E10 wasn’t bad enough for your small engines, the powers that be are considering moving to E15 and E30 as industry standards.
And, speaking of the manufacturing uncertainty surrounding CARB compliance, just this past January, California introduced a new evaporative standard for emission requirements. The new standards require that manufacturers change the way they test. Rather than testing out individual components, CARB compliance requires a SHED (Sealed Housing for Evaporative Determination) test for new products. This requires taking new products to test houses for baseline tests and extended tests in particular conditions. This is a significant and costly undertaking that will affect both small and large manufacturers…and eventually, it will affect the consumer as these costs trickle down.
In the works for 2020, we’re already looking at a planned rewrite to these new emissions standards, which plan to reduce pollutants by 20%. While this concerted effort to clean up the air sounds great, all of this (over)regulation stifles new production.
New Technology Needs Regulatory Certainty
One of the things that helps manufacturing efforts advance is certainty in the industry. Toolmakers generally have 3-5 year plans for their product lines. However, when politics gets involved, and when Congress avoids laying down decisive policy, manufacturers have a hard time planning new products. After all, who wants to sink R&D and marketing budgets into a tool line that will likely become obsolete 6 months after launch when a new statute becomes mandatory?
Special thanks to Kris Kiser, president and CEO of the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute. To learn more about OPEI you can visit them here .
