Reduce? Reuse? Recycle? Toyota strives to do better by Mother Earth and protect the environment as much as possible throughout its manufacturing process.

In addition to saving the company nearly $600 million since 2002, Toyota’s efforts have earned them 11 consecutive ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year – Sustained Excellence Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for “continued leadership in protecting the environment through superior energy efficiency.” The awards are the most by any automaker.

“While there’s always room for improvement, achieving energy efficiency demonstrates that good ideas have helped us become environmentally responsible while making a significant impact to our bottom line,” said Robin Haugen general manager of Toyota’s plant and environmental group.  “Through our team members’ efforts and outstanding collaboration, we have minimized our environmental footprint in communities where we assemble vehicles, engines and parts.  We’re so proud to receive our 11th consecutive ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year – Sustained Excellence Award from the U.S. EPA and we’ll strive to do better.”

Examples of achieving energy efficiency at Toyota’s 14 North American manufacturing plants include:

• Reduced total energy use by 35 percent per vehicle produced or 14 billion kilowatt hours of energy. That’s enough power to keep the city of Chicago up and running for nearly an entire year.
• Reduced CO2 emissions by 40 percent per vehicle produced by eliminating the use of electricity and natural gas when avoidable.
• Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Alabama has saved 300,000 gallons of water a year – enough to fill half of an Olympic-size swimming pool – by reusing compressor condensate water in the cooling tower, switched to higher-efficiency motors and used compressed air more efficiently, and installed LED lighting, solar lights and daylighting to reduce purchased electricity.
• Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Indiana reduced the volume of air that has to be conditioned in the paint booths, a process that’s necessary for the paint to adhere to vehicles.  The project reduced energy use by 125,000 MMBtus, enough to power 1,450 average U.S. homes for a year and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 8,900 metric tons.
• Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky has teamed up with Waste Services of the Bluegrass to generate power from local landfill waste that naturally creates methane gas.
• Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Mississippi installed a geothermal heat exchanger that supplies chilled water to a compressed air dryer to eliminate the chiller load in the winter months when the plant’s HVAC systems are not using chilled water.  This reduces electricity usage by 1.5 million kilowatt hours per year, equal to 56 average U.S. homes.
• Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Texas uses about 1 million gallons of recycled water per production day, or about 250 million gallons each year.

images courtesy of Toyota