Toyota's push to build green cars may destroy 17th century Japanese rice paddies
Toyota has worked hard to cultivate its image as the "green" automaker. And, with so many hybrids on the road, it can back its claim up. Still, some critics have cited the fact that mining for battery components is bad for the environment and the thousands of miles that massive, CO2-spewing ships travel to park those hybrids on our shores more than negate the positive effects of of the hybrids. It's hard to argue with 50 mpg for $22,000, though, and, after all, politicians love them some hybrids.
Toyota's plans to build a new technical center and test track only 30 miles from its Aichi, Japan headquarters have its critics chirping anew, as the land pegged for construction is a 17th century rice patty. Toyota plans to use the facility to fine-tune its vehicles and stay ahead of Honda and GM in the hybrid game, but the cost may be a bit too steep.
To clear the 1,631 acres needed for the facility, Toyota plans to deforest 691 acres, fill the rice paddies and flatten mountains. Flatten mountains? Really? Good thing Toyota also owns Hino heavy trucks. Activists allege that the construction will destroy the habitat of the endangered gray-faced buzzard and oriental honey buzzard. That doesn't sound very eco-cool.
[Source: Bloomberg]
Photo by Steph & Adam. Licensed under Creative Commons license 2.0.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Woodenbee 10:22AM (6/22/2009)
I hope they dont do this, it would show that anything Toyota does is just lip service, Japanese business has a horrible mentality towards conservation, they can barely grasp the concept let alone act on it
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nrb 11:12AM (6/22/2009)
Of course anything Toyota does is lip service.
At the same time, what do we really know about this land? I doubt Toyota went out and found the most sacred ground they could for vehicle testing.
There's more to this story.
ale 11:31AM (6/22/2009)
i dont know... this sounds like something toyota would do... dont forget now, they too build big trucks, and they want to keep up w/ everyone else.. stlll though Toyota needs to find somewhere else, like Tata had to do...
Matt 12:25PM (6/22/2009)
Guys, it's not like this is a lot of land, even in Japan. You could make is sound more impressive by saying 71,046,360 square feet of land, or 10 trillion square inches, but what we're talking about is 2.5 square miles, or a 1.6 mile block of land. Honestly, I think we deforest (no rice patties) more than that before lunch on a daily basis in the US. I love the earth, but they've got to put test tracks somewhere and rice patties and mountains are just about the most common land in Japan, so... what do you expect?
nrb 2:46PM (6/22/2009)
"Honestly, I think we deforest (no rice patties) more than that before lunch on a daily basis in the US. "
I don't think that's the case. In the midwest anyway, we actually plant nearly twice as much as we cut down.
Matt 10:57PM (6/22/2009)
I don't mean virgin forest. Just a place that is made of trees and wildlife. I'm 100% positive we cut down at least 10x that many acres every day. The Southeast alone loggs about 6 million acres a year, that's over 16,000 acres a day. Every day; including Saturday and Sunday. There are rotations of course, and almost no virgin forests are logged, but animals that have been living on the land are rarely 25 years old (average age of Southern Yellow Pine at final cut), so it was their home their whole life and the ecological impact is the same on an individual basis. Don't believe me? Take a look here:
http://www.greenpressinitiative.org/impacts/southeastforests.htm
Throwback 11:11AM (6/22/2009)
"To clear the 1,631 acres needed for the facility, Toyota plans to deforest 691 acres, fill the rice paddies and flatten mountains"
I am shocked Toyota would do this. Afterall, they only care about the enviroment, not silly profits.
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tamyuun 11:39AM (6/22/2009)
17th century rice paddies? What an amazingly misleading way to refer to land that just hasn`t been used for much of anything ever. It isn`t as if there are "historical rice paddies". *sigh*
It`s a huge swath of land that is basically being used for little more than hobby farming at this point. The huge "deforestation" is mainly those chunks of trees between fields - not some expansive and historical forest. It`s a patchwork area of active rice paddies and those that have been essentially abandoned, giving rapid rise to bamboo "forests" that can literally pop up in a year. I am willing to bet that the area of long term growth forest is relatively small.
As for flattening mountains - most of Japan is mountain. It`s very very hard to find a large open space that doesn`t already have a city in it - at least in the area around Toyota. And I think it would be quite hard to manage any large facility squeezed in between mountain after mountain...
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Rick 4:36PM (6/22/2009)
Thanks.
meme 12:01PM (6/22/2009)
Let me second what tamyuun wrote about Japan. I've been there before. The country is little more than mountain ranges rising out of the water, with a couple tiny flat areas here and there. People don't crowd in like rats in cities like Tokyo for the fun of it. Taking a train through the Japan Alps is really revealing; in many places, the trip is basically 1) enter a tunnel; 2) travel through the mountain in the tunnel; 3) leave the tunnel and immediately go up on a bridge; 4) travel across the bridge over a gorge; 5) leave the bridge and enter another tunnel through the next mountain (repeat).
And furthermore, that "CO2-spewing ships" link is garbage, *as was pointed out in the comments section on it*. They're not releasing massive amounts of CO2 -- they're releasing large amounts of *other pollutants*. But since they're primarily released in areas where they'll break down long before they reach anyone, it's not a health threat. Contrary to what this article again presents, mile per mile, oceangoing freight is the most efficient way to ship things. Only a tiny fraction of a vehicle's lifecycle energy use is spent on the ship. I mean, seriously, think about it: large cargo ships get something like 500 miles per gallon per ton of cargo. A 1 1/2 ton car going 6,000 miles from Japan to the US west coast thus requires 18 gallons of diesel. *Oooooh, shudder!*
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usbseawolf2000 1:04PM (6/22/2009)
They are doing to shorten the development cycle of next generation hybrids. The faster next gen green tech can be developed, the better it would be. That's the bigger picture.
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Kid Dynamic 1:42PM (6/22/2009)
Thank goodness for the comments section to smooth out the rumor mongering. Is this AutoBlogGreen or the National Inquirer?
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DasBoese 1:49PM (6/22/2009)
One should mention that these oh so green rice paddies emit large amounts of methane.
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damien 2:28PM (6/22/2009)
Let's create confussion about an issues that is so clear cut. Use less gas, better fot the environment.
Here is the real flip. The tar sands are ripping up more land then all of the lithium mines will ever destroy. That is the real flip.
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Snoopy 5:54PM (6/22/2009)
If this is a good idea and makes sense (in other words, if they've done the necessary research on this) then they should go ahead and do it. Otherwise, here's an idea. We've got a lot of flat land here in North America, not to mention production facilities that aren't producing anything.
Why not do it here? Just saying.
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John Metcalf 9:47PM (6/22/2009)
There's a lot of vacant land around Detroit they could use. Most of it's cleared and ready for development. :-)
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GenKhan2 2:27PM (6/23/2009)
I encourage them to build as they have planned.
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