Call it “a bid to retain green credentials”, call it “distractions to all the recalls,” Toyota are keen to let you know that they are targeting a 27% reduction in energy consumed per vehicle produced at their North American facilities. Environmentalleader.com reports that Toyota are using fiscal year 2002 as a baseline and Toyota hopes that by 2011, the goal of 27% will be achieved. The areas which Toyota are concentrating on are energy & climate change, recycling & reduced use of resources, substances of concern and air quality. Now here come the boring figures.
For 2009, Toyota expects their NA plants to use 61,481 BTU’s per square foot, which is down from 2008 which was 66,234BTU’s. Other ways which Toyota is trying to reduce emissions is by implementing solar panels at its Ontario, California parts plant; it will be the second largest solar panel array in the United States. At Princeton, Indiana and Ontario, California, they are using water-borne paint systems to reduce volatile organic compounds. Now whilst the crowd with green-tinted glasses will applaud Toyota’s efforts, here’s another little statistic. According to Toyota’s own North American Environmental Report, Toyota’s North American plants consume $147million in energy per year and emit 1.1 million metric tons of CO2 per year. It would be well within Toyota’s interests to shave 27% of both those figures, especially with tax on every tonne of Carbon dioxide produced. So what some might call “environmental measures”, I call “cost cutting”.
I agree. In this case, cost cutting = green. Green is good. Advertise it. We are saving the environment by saving money. I would expect others to follow suit. In fact, I think Subaru already beat them to the punch a year or so ago when they advertised about a clean assembly plant.
Indeed. I’m not understanding the tone of this writeup.
Is the poster trying to say that if an energy saving measure saves money, it’s greenwashing?
Are you saying that if a company uses a lot of energy, then reducing some of that energy consumption is also greenwashing?
Are you sneering at greenwashing, which usually indicates advertising in excess of the benefit, but then you call real energy reduction numbers “boring”?
In short, why the nasty tone?
I suspect that Ms. Corrigan may not have made the title/headline choice, because it seems to not match with the content of the article.
I agree that cost cutting, no matter the underlying reason (the economy, cost of raw materials, fuel, labor, etc) can be considered “green”. Personally, I couldn’t care less about “green” claims (referring to low pollution) because I don’t believe we are capable of polluting ourselves into oblivion; we’ll run out of oil before that will happen.
But if you know your market and your market wants everything green, then you push it, regardless of your own belief system. You push it as far as it will go. Then you push it some more.
But is it “greenwashing” if you are merely offering what your market wants? After all, the customer is always right, even if he’s ignorant or downright dumb.
Well there are two issues:
– Particulate and hazardous gas pollution (like NOX and Carbon Monoxide). If you don’t think we can put enough of this into the atmosphere to cause harm, you haven’t been to China, Mexico City, or seen photos of LA 60 years ago on a smoggy day. In Bejing, many days you cannot even see the sun because the pollution is so bad. In fact, a significant portion of the smog in the California central valley is from China. The only reason most cities in the US now are so clean is because of smog controls that you probably think are BS.
– CO2 and certain other so-called greenhouse gases. These are often not directly harmful to breathe or ingest. The concern is that they will cause an increase in the global temperature. Like it or not, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is going up. What astonishes me is that you think that cutting down trees en masse and burning up an entire planet’s worth of stored, highly concentrated carbon will *not* do anything harmful to our climate. We will run out eventually, but we arguably haven’t even hit the halfway point on oil and there’s a heck of a lot of coal still in the ground.
Good corporate citizenship is included in Toyota’s mission statement, something that seems quaint to American companies, but maybe shouldn’t be. I personally don’t want to live around sociopaths; I’m not sure why we want companies, who have all the rights of people and a lot more power, to behave sociopathically.
+1 Toyota is simply giving the market what it wants. Considering all the global warming hoopla going on at the Denmark Tax Climate Summit this week, it makes perfect sense for Toyota to unveil another eco car right now and cash in on the focus people/media have on the subject.
Regarding greenwashing – Toyota has been obsessed with maximizing efficiency and minimizing waste of all kinds in manufacturing from early on — that’s part of the “Toyota Production System”. Whether it’s wasted time, wasted motion, wasted money, wasted energy – they want to eliminate it. Their corporate philosophy (c.f. their shareholder info on their US or Japanese website, for example) has had as one focus the minimizing of environmental impact for quite a number of years. This is not something they just cooked up this month to distract people from the killer floormats ™.
+1 imag – That is what amazes me sometimes that people can’t stop to think that releasing something in a matter of years what it took the earth’s natural cycle hundreds of millions of year to capture is not harmful in anyway.
In the sense of I don’t care what you did for me yesterday, what are you gonna do for me today and tomorrow… or lies, damn lies, statistics (?)…
Excuse me, but why are they measuring against a 2002 baseline in (Happy New Year) 2010? If the 27% is going to come by 2011, they have a bit over a year to achieve their target … so, what is the saving they will achieve in THAT time? And what part of that 27% has already been achieved?
Also, given that the market is down, have they normalized the numbers by extrapolating their performance for 2008-end 2010?
I didn’t run the figures, but I have the hunch that Toyota is taking advantage of past achievements, reduced production, and the fact that crude oil is back to its 2004 level to make it look like they have become more efficient. If an analysis of the numbers proves me wrong, I’ll willingly stand corrected.
Using an out of date baseline usually makes things harder, not easier, when your company is growing. It means they are trying to reduce from previous (lower) levels.
And for what it’s worth, Toyota was putting in solar in 2002 as part of a LEED Gold certified set of buildings. Ford has also threw down for an eco-groovy headquarters, so I’m not trying to be a Toyota fanboy, I am just saying that the overarching strategy isn’t some conspiracy to distract from floormats.
We’ll believe the Green-wash when they stop selling Sequoias and Land Crushers.
Toyota Canada has annouced this morning Dec.10th that they are adding a second shift at Woodstock, Ontario with 800 jobs from March 2010 to produce the RAV4 cross over vehicle!