Originally posted by: Vic
Well, marin, the Prius' overall environmental footprint is not as kind as its fans would make it out to be. Just because you might get good gas mileage (and not every Prius owner does) does not change the fact that the nickel for the batteries comes from the Sudbury deposits in Ontario, Canada, where the ore has high concentrations of sulfur. As such the acid rain from the smelting in the region is so bad, and the vegetation of the region so devastated by it, that the Apollo astronauts trained there. But nah, that 1250 foot high super smokestack fixed that problem, right?
Whew, are we all glad that you're worried about diesels!
In the cause for the environment, one simple fact sifts through all the BS. Consume less. That's it. Anything else is lies. But, like some fat ass sweating on the treadmill and slugging one slimfast after another before he goes out to eat at Outback, we just don't want to see the truth.
Of course the Toyota Prius' environmental footprint is not as bad as the hybrid haters would make it out to be. The Prius consumes less fuel, so you should love it.
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One of the most misleading ones, which has been spread by countless blogs over the past several weeks, and cited without verification by several sources that appear reputable, looks to have originated in a story last November in England's Daily Mail, a right-leaning, British tabloid paper, which bore the gleefully spiteful title 'Toyota factory turns landscape to arid wilderness.' An editorial, published last month in a newspaper for a small state university on the East Coast, helped bring this misleading report a new life.
But it isn't a Toyota factory at all. The automaker has, in fact, only been purchasing significant amounts of nickel from the Sudbury , Ontario , Inco mine for its batteries in recent years,
while the environmental disaster the headline is referring to largely occurred more than thirty years ago.
And that ore is at the core of a semi-urban legend that leads to dumb headlines like "HUMMER Greener than Prius," and others we've seen recently
Toyota says that nickel has been mined from in Sudbury since the 1800s, and that "the large majority of the environmental damage from nickel mining in and around Sudbury was caused by mining practices that were abandoned decades ago." Out of the Inco mine's 174,800-ton output
in 2004, Toyota purchased 1000 tons, just over a half-percent of its output. The plant's emissions of sulfur dioxide are down 90 percent from 1970 levels, and it's targeting a 97-percent reduction in those emissions by 2015, according to Toyota.
Of course, metal-hydride hybrid batteries aren't the only use for nickel. One widespread use of nickel is for the chrome (chromium-nickel) plating that's widely used in trim and wheels for luxury vehicles. And according to the Nickel Institute, which represents trade groups, manufacturers, and nickel producers, about two-thirds of all nickel mined goes toward stainless steel, which is of course widely used in vehicles - exhaust systems, for instance. Another significant portion goes toward engine alloys - pistons, rings, liners and the like; in general, the larger the engine, the more nickel it's likely to have.
But Toyota also says that the study uses an unrealistically low estimated lifetime for hybrids, and that there's no data to support its assumptions in this. For instance, according to the study the average Prius is expected to go 109,000 miles over its lifetime, while a Hummer H1 would go 379,000 miles. CNW says about hybrids: "?these are generally secondary vehicles in a household OR they are driven in restricted or short range environments such as college campuses or retirement neighborhoods."