Envirofit Tackles Global Air Pollution

Published April 2006

Saving the world from pollution by reducing global CO2 emissions is no small chore, but it’s exactly the challenge that Envirofit is tackling.

The widespread use of inefficient two-stroke engines has led to severe air pollution problems in many developing countries.

In fact, a visit to the Envirofit website reveals an ambitious mission statement to “develop and disseminate technologies that reduce pollution or enhance energy efficiency in developing countries, thereby enhancing the environment and public health, fostering economic growth and alleviating poverty.”

Global impacts of pollution

Because more than half of the world’s population lives in Asia, the air pollution produced in that part of the world is a major problem – although the problem extends to the rest of the world as well. The pollutants, known as the Asian Brown Cloud, can travel halfway around the world in one week, impacting health, agriculture and climate. The World Health Organization suggests that as many as 15,000 people die each day from air pollution, impacting world health even more than the major health hazards of smoking, AIDS and cancer.

With a focus on curbing air pollution at its source, Envirofit, a CSU startup out of the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory or EECL,is working to reduce emissions from the small two-stroke engines commonly used on motorcycles in Asia and Africa, where there are more than 50 million of these vehicles. Many of these are used as tricycle taxis; the taxi is a motorcycle with a custom sidecar bolted to it for carrying passengers. Each taxi produces the pollution equivalent of about 50 modern automobiles, resulting in chronic air pollution.

Envirofit’s answer to the two-stroke engine pollution problem is to retrofit the engines with a conversion kit that uses direct fuel injection, resulting in a cleaner-burning two-stroke engine.

Humble beginnings

The project had humble beginnings. Students at the EECL competed in the SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge, designing a snowmobile that was, at the time, the cleanest snowmobile on record – 300 times cleaner than a stock model, decreasing pollution by more than 99 percent, cutting fuel consumption 35 percent, reducing noise to conversational levels and matching the power of the top-performing commercial machines.

The snowmobile effort lead to the creation of Envirofit, which develops and disseminates technologies that reduce pollution and promote energy efficiency in the developing world. In January 2006, Envirofit signed its first major agreement to retrofit 3,000 two-stroke taxi engines in the Philippines. In 2007, Independent UK charity Shell Foundation committed $25 million to Envirofit to develop 10 million clean-burning cookstoves around the developing world. The Shell Foundation aims to significantly reduce the number of global deaths caused by indoor air pollution from smoke generated by traditional fires and stoves used by more than three billion people.