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ROCHESTER, N.Y. – As businesses, school districts, cities and power companies all signal they’re not ready for the state’s forced transition to zero emission trucks and buses, one local company says it’s making diesel engines cleaner in the meantime.
In a discreet building along Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, engineers have found a way to significantly reduce emissions and carbon build up in diesel engines. John Erbland is the founder and CEO of Paradigm Emissions Technology.
Paradigm designs and manufactures a plasma system that de-carbonizes diesel emissions. “It eliminates what is called carbon soot, carbon soot comes out of a diesel engine and it clogs up the components and it creates back pressure on the engine that then ends up burning more fuel,” Erbland explains, “through this whole process we’re also reducing CO2 because the more fuel you burn, the more CO2 you create.”
For trucking companies, the technology could save millions of dollars in maintenance.
“We started with the basic science of using plasma and physics to de-carbonize emissions so, went through a number of years of development, iteration, testing and tested our product at RIT in the diesel test lab, we tested it with companies like RTS and Lewis Tree Service and came out of that process with our current product,” Erbland says. A product that’s now being used on dozens of RTS buses, some of Monroe County’s heavy equipment and hundreds of other trucks owned by local companies.
Paradigm has been a labor of love for its founders, “everything we did in the early years came out of our pockets and so we spent quite a number of years just boot strapping the company, living lean, not paying ourselves a salary,” Erbland says. He’s hoping to reach $100 million in sales in the coming years, “it’ll be through both selling retrofits and replacement parts as well as licensing the technology to engine manufacturers and vehicle manufacturers.”
The technology, he’s hoping, might act as a stop-gap for companies, school districts and municipalities during the state’s forced transition to zero emissions.
Paradigm recently got an infusion of cash from Brown and White Ventures, a local investment firm interested in helping the company continue to grow.
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