Environment report highlights need for change

31 January 2008

Environment report highlights need for change in transport and energy trends

IPENZ believes innovative technology and sophisticated, smart engineering solutions is the road ahead to improve and reduce energy consumption including in our transport as outlined in the Ministry for the Environments latest Environment New Zealand 2007 Report, earlier today.

“We are driving bigger, older inefficient cars further and this proves that although people might be aware of the problems, public education is not enough. We need to introduce smart engineering technologies and eliminate aging transport from the market place,” says Andrew Cleland, IPENZ Chief Executive. “The only way we can get older technologies out of our market place is to implement stringent minimum standards, on new cars.”

“We need a wide range of standards across a variety of sectors to eliminate inefficient technologies from our market place. Properly designed standards encourage innovation and minimise lifecycle costs. They compliment market tools. We can only come up with more efficient transport technologies for instance cars that reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions is by innovative technologies and smart engineering solutions,” says Andrew Cleland.

“Sophisticated engineering solutions can only come about by having a highly skilled workforce in New Zealand, who through innovation and technology can provide answers. New Zealand has the lowest percentage of graduating engineers at all levels from trades to Phd in the OECD and to move forward on these transportation problems we need a skilled workforce that can develop smart technology to ensure impacts on our environment are reduced,” says Dr Cleland.

“We are pleased to see the Ministry for the Environment has produced this report, now we can identify the trends, we need to reverse them.”

ENDS

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