If you have ever owned a car, the chances are you will have experienced this: you’ve finished filling your vehicle with petrol, and pull the nozzle out from your car to see a few drops of petrol drip off the end and on the to the garage forecourt. You make sure it doesn’t land on your shoes; you put the nozzle back in its holder and don’t give it another thought.
It has been calculated though, that these few drops across every fill-up in every country in the world amounts to half a billion litres of fuel being lost into the atmosphere each year. This is a problem which Dram International, a company from Ontario, Canada have managed to solve, but are still awaiting investors in order to get their device into production.
The nozzle looks like a fairly ordinary metal contraption but its design allows the pressure and tension functionality to withhold any droplets not implemented into the car, rather than them falling out on to the ground.
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The 'fuel nozzle drip retainer' could be innovative on a global scale and a spokesman for the company has explained the potential it has:
“Anyone who has pumped fuel before has noticed the drops that fall to the ground after you’ve removed the nozzle from the vehicle.
“We've designed a method of retaining these drops, which initiates a recycling process whereby the next customer in line receives the fuel that would have been otherwise wasted.
“These drops may not seem like a significant amount, however when taken into account globally, these drops amount to approximately half a billion litres of fuel that falls to the ground and is evaporated into our atmosphere every year.'
“Without our attachment evaporation is dependent on how much fuel is dropped to the ground as well as the evaporation of the residual fuel left in the spout after pumping.
“With our attachment, we’ve eliminated the drippage variable thus making evaporation purely dependent on the fuel in the nozzle. When contained within a nozzle fuel evaporates at a much slower rate than if it was exposed to the open air.
“Nozzles are most often kept on a holster in a shaded environment and shielded from wind thus minimizing the evaporation effect of direct sunlight and air diffusivity and therefore slowing down evaporation.
“After taking evaporation into account we are saving roughly 89 per cent of the fuel that would have dropped out of a nozzle without our attachment.”
