Push to ban more than a quarter of trucks from Melbourne and Sydney by 2025

Old trucks should be banned from Melbourne and Sydney as part of a plan to reduce exposure to deadly air pollution, according to a new Grattan Institute report.

Fourteen per cent of Australia’s current truck fleet was made before 1996, when Australia introduced its first truck emissions regulations.

More than a quarter of the fleet are pre-2003, when emissions restrictions were very weak.

“A truck sold before 1996 emits 60 times as much particulate matter and about eight-times as much of the poisonous nitrogen oxide as a modern truck,” transport and cities program director at the Grattan Institute, Marrion Terrill, told Ross and Russel.

“It is doing material damage. It’s killing more than 400 Australians a year.”

The Grattan Institute is calling for pre-2003 diesel trucks to be banned in Melbourne and Sydney from 2025.

Even the new trucks coming into Australia aren’t as clean as they should be, with Australia’s truck pollution standards a decade behind those in other major global markets.

Press PLAY below to hear the Grattan Institute’s plan