Regarding "Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage"

Just the mere reference to CNW marketing is enough to render this article totally useless by anyone who's minimally intelligent. By this I mean all the ridicule and embarrassment they (and Mr. Spinella) have been subjected by auto manufacturers, Research centers manned by real engineers and academia, and government agencies to mention a few.

It is nice to have these silly articles foating around because we need them as real life examples of what mis-information and ignorance looks like.

Anyhow this article is old news and has been dismissed at nauseum.

Cheers;

MSantos

I read this article and I came out with a lot of concern. I actually questioned my decision to buy my Prius. So I thought that if I feel this way, I should go ahead and research some of the claimed facts. So I researched. I actually spent quite a few hours researching the statements in this article. Afterwards, I came to the conclusion that a person can make ANYTHING sound terrible, as long as they omit or bend key facts and truths. Here's my thoughts...and there happens to be quite a few of 'em.

The EPA estimates... That's old news. Fact is even regular gasoline engine cars drop their estimated percentage in real-world driving. My last car was estimated 36 mpg on the highway and my realworld driving got me 30. Hmmm...no mention of that in the article.

This article makes an interesting environmental point, however this article seems to make a play on "pollution". Don't get me wrong, pollution of any kind is terrible. The Inco Mine, like many other metal mining facilities, has certainly not been kind to the environment with its past environmental violations. Keep in mind that this mine has been open for over a century. The largest bulk of its damage to the environment occurred in the early to mid 20th century, well before the world took environmental damage seriously, and way before hybrids even hit the market. The article seems to paint a likeness to the sulfur pollution that comes from the smelting of nickel ore and the carbon emissions that come from the tailpipe of a car. Sure, both certainly do have an impact on the environment. Relative to carbon, the bulk of sulfur emissions damage is usually localized to the region where it occurs. A single sulfur-spitting volcanic eruption does the same kind of local damage. Excessive atmospheric sulfur results in localized acid rain, flora and fauna death, and soil release. However, mother nature has had millions of years to deal with sulfur and (compared to carbon emmissions) its easier for mother nature to recover from. While I hate to downplay ANY kind of pollutant, sulfur doesn't hang in the atmosphere quite like its carbon emission counterpart. Unlike the level of carbon emissions, it's not as big a contributor to the earth's potential to turn into an easy-bake oven. Also, sulfur and many of the biproducts of smelting nickel also come from the steel, alloy, and aluminum making process. ALL cars made of metal have contributed to pollution in their making.

According to the article, the mined nickel has to be transported here and there for further refinement and manufacturing. Essentially pointing out that additional environmental expenditures occur to transport it. Well guess what, that occurs with most all manufactured cars. Are we to assume that every vehicle part is manufactured in one place? Heck no. Every vehicle out there is an assemblage of parts from around the globe. Your brake rotors could come from China, your oxygen sensor from Texas, and your shifter knob could come from Tiawan. Like nickel, their raw materials were brought in bulk to their plants to be manufactured.

The article hovered and ultimately ended on a note for the overall cost of the vehicle from its birth to its demise. Hybrid owners know that its technology hasn't gotten to the point where it pays for itself to purchase. At the rate I'm going, using real world gas consumption figures, the overall cost to own my hybrid versus the gasoline engine vehicle I was looking at I would break even after 4 1/2 years. Run the surplus and demand figures on steel and alloys and aluminum, then compare them to nickel. I'm sure if we had a 1 to 1 ratio of hybrid cars with nickel batteries on the road versus regular gasoline engine vehicles, the price of ownership would be closer. 6-7 years ago it was cheaper to buy a regular CRT TV versus a plasma. Amazing how prices didn't permanently stay at $7,000 for a 32 inch plasma. Price ultimately came down. Same thing applies here as does anything else that hits a healthy market.

Should hybrids be the end-all-be-all automotive industry's answer to global warming? No. But they are a step in the right direction. The next step in hybrid battery evolution is lithium based batteries. They can store more electricity and provide more of a punch to the needs of acceleration and speed. Their addition will cut carbon emissions even further. Sure that Aveo's gonna save me some moolah at the pump, but its going to offer little benefit to the GLOBAL environment over a hybrid. The only thing this article's got is the dust to dust cost of a hybrid. And that price will come down with time, as everything new to the market naturally does.

This article had its points but what really made this article invalid to me was the mention of the overall cost per mile in the life of a hummer. Why does it cost so little for this SUV? Maybe because it's a fleet vehicle, has been purchased by law enforcement agencies, and by the military. If you have a high enough demand, have been manufacturing essentially the same vehicle for decades, you'll have a means to spit out your product faster and at less cost. I'd like to see the Prius energy and cost to manufacture after as many decades. Show me how many tons of CO2 goes into the dust to dust life of a Hummer and pit it against my Prius. The 2007 Hummer H2 weighs twice as much as my Prius. That means twice as much metal, rubber, and plastic went into its overall manufacturing. Yet, it takes 3 to 4 times as much gasoline to drive it. If CNW wants to make the comparison betweeen a Hummer and Prius I don't care about the cost. Show me the carbon pollution figures.

So those are my thoughts. I'm probably wrong with some things, right with others, and somewhere in the middle here and there. Thanks for putting this article up, TXatheist. I really learned quite a bit about the processes involved with building my Prius. It was really quite fun to learn about it. Ultimately, the article helped re-affirm my choice to buy my Prius. Also, it helped further solidify my belief that many authors print articles just like this in the hopes that readers will take it at face value and not research the facts to find its flaws.

I found the following article and not sure of the validity of the source but I am interested to find out the truth of the situation before buying my next vehicle (but I promise it will not be a Hummer) but maybe I don't want a hybrid either.

I would like to make the most environmentally responsible choice; I am willing to personally spend more but I would like to know that the vehicle is better for the environment in whole, not just in gasoline usage but damaging in other ways.

Can anyone share more info or links in order to make a truly informed decision?

Link: http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/editorial/editorial_item.asp?NewsID=188
Source: The Recorder, Central Connecticut State University

Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage
By Chris Demorro
Staff Writer

The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care. Unfortunately for them, their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer.

Before we delve into the seedy underworld of hybrids, you must first understand how a hybrid works. For this, we will use the most popular hybrid on the market, the Toyota Prius.

The Prius is powered by not one, but two engines: a standard 76 horsepower, 1.5-liter gas engine found in most cars today and a battery- powered engine that deals out 67 horsepower and a whooping 295ft/lbs of torque, below 2000 revolutions per minute. Essentially, the Toyota Synergy Drive system, as it is so called, propels the car from a dead stop to up to 30mph. This is where the largest percent of gas is consumed. As any physics major can tell you, it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving. The battery is recharged through the braking system, as well as when the gasoline engine takes over anywhere north of 30mph. It seems like a great energy efficient and environmentally sound car, right?

You would be right if you went by the old government EPA estimates, which netted the Prius an incredible 60 miles per gallon in the city and 51 miles per gallon on the highway. Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were, which consisted of highway speeds limited to 55mph and acceleration of only 3.3 mph per second. The new tests which affect all 2008 models give a much more realistic rating with highway speeds of 80mph and acceleration of 8mph per second. This has dropped the Prius’s EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg. This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs.

However, if that was the only issue with the Prius, I wouldn’t be writing this article. It gets much worse.

Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.

“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.

All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?

Wait, I haven’t even got to the best part yet.

When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.

Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.

The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it.

So, if you are really an environmentalist - ditch the Prius. Instead, buy one of the most economical cars available - a Toyota Scion xB. The Scion only costs a paltry $0.48 per mile to put on the road. If you are still obsessed over gas mileage - buy a Chevy Aveo and fix that lead foot.

One last fun fact for you: it takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses.

Hi all,
New here, found this thread so I thought I would chime in.

As MSantos says, this article has been debunked so there is no need for line by line critique.

There are a lot of assumptions in that opinion piece that are not well supported. The one that jumps out at me (perhaps because I am a geologist) is the 1,000 ton/year purchase of Ni by Toyota. This represents less than on percent of the Ni production at Sudbury (0.75% from the numbers I found). To attribute all of the devistation caused by the smelter to a single customer is misleading. Just like global warming isn't caused exclusively by Hummers.

All and all, the argument that Hummers are "greener" than hybrids is a distortion.

The original article is an opinion piece (i.e., no fact-checking) for a college newspaper that publishes wild claims in a pathetic attempt to draw attention to itself. In February, The Recorder published "Rape only hurts if you fight it" and now in March, "Prius outdoes hummer." This newspaper and this article are garbage.

1. Regarding new EPA mileage estimates, Demorro claims the Chevy Aveo's mileage puts it within "spitting distance" of the Prius. The new EPA combined mileage put the Chevy Aveo at 26 mpg, the Toyota Prius at 46 mpg. So I guess 20 miles more per gallon is "spitting distance."

2. The "Dust-to-dust" study is from a marketing firm, not a science journal. It arrives at an artificially high cost for the Prius by assigning it an arbitrary lifespan of 100k miles, and a Hummer 300k miles. There's Prius being used as cabs that have over 200,000 miles on them now.

And, insofar as a car lasting, what car do you expect to repair less? A Toyota Prius or a GM Hummer? You can check Consumer Reports for the answer to that one. A good analysis of the flaws in dust-to-dust is available from TrueDelta.

3. The Sudbury info is seriously outdated, and the comment about moon buggies (like, when did Nasa test moon buggies — early 1970’s) ought to have given the author a clue. Sudbury was polluted by a century of mining (1870 on). In fact, some of Sudbury’s nickel went into making the Statue of Liberty. Currently, the mine is owned by INCO (not Toyota), and produces 100,000 tons of nickel a year, of which Toyota buys 1% (1000 tons). Blaming Toyota for the pollution at Sudbury is ludicrous. Nickel, by the way, is primarily used to make stainless steel. The Mail on Sunday newspaper, which ran the story the college article's Sudbry info is a thin re-write of (visible here), used a stock photo you can buy online taken in 1994 to illustrate the pollution (visible here). There were, of course, no Prius in existence or being manufactured in 1994.

Furthermore, Sudbury is no longer this polluted, as INCO and the city have planted over 8 million trees there since 1979. A really good history online of the Sudbury devastation/reforestation comes from GM Canada -- that's GM, maker of the Hummer, ahem, writing about how Sudbury was polluted and how it has come back. Really, one should blame Chicago more than Toyota, as Sudbury's trees were all cut down in 1871 to help rebuild Chicago after the fire. GM provides telling photos of some of the reclamation from 1979 to present.

Canadian news recently broadcast a show on Sudbury's regreening (the acid rain problem David Martin of Greenpeace is talking about is the situation pre 1972).

The author of this article, Demorro, is so fact-challenged that in his follow-up piece, wherin he admits "Dust-to-Dust" is suspect, he continues bashing the Prius by saying people should instead buy a Tesla Roadster for $30,000. The Tesla Roadster actually costs $92,000. Demorro can't even get the list price of a car right; I seriously wouldn't trust his opinion on hybrids.

I agree, hybrids won't save us. They're only a step in the right direction. We can't stop here. Demand plug-in vehicles from your dealer. Demand an alternative way to run your car other than using oil.
Drive whatever you're driving for as long as it runs while saving the car payments. Tell the dealers that you'll buy the plug-in when it comes out.

Here's the way I look at it. If you get rid of your '98 truck, someone will buy it and continue to drive it until the wheels fall off so the gas will be consumed either way. From the planet's viewpoint, it doesn't matter which human is producing the emissions. This makes this a personal decision. I'd say you have 2 choices:
1. keep driving the 14 mpg truck until you can get a plug-in.
or
2. buy a hybrid (I'll assume Prius) today and a plug-in whenever they're available and affordable.

detailed analysis of #1:
I don't expect a huge number of plug-in vehicles to be available until after 2010 unless you make a huge effort to get into the line. The Tesla's going to set you back $100K, the eBox $70K, a Tango ~$100K, an NmG $25K, or the Phoenix SUT $45K in California (I'm not sure where you live). Assuming you haven't cashed in your entitled mid-life crisis car, I'll assume that if you wait for the plug-in, you'll go for the Tesla. It's the most real of the cars on the above list and will probably be available first. If you put $30K down today on a Tesla (assuming you have that kind of cash laying around), you'll probably get your car in 2009. This gives you about 2 1/2 years of driving your truck, during which time you'll probably spend about $5,800 on gas (assuming $3.25/gal and 10K miles per year). This plus the cost of the Tesla will set you back $105,000.

detailed analysis of #2:
You buy the Prius for $25,000 (maybe get $4000 for your truck for a total of) $21,000. You'll burn $1,800 worth of gas in the 2 1/2 years for a savings of about $4000 in gas. Maybe in another 2 1/2 years an affordable plug-in will be available (or maybe not) for $35K so you will have spent about $58,000.

Clearly #2 is the cheapest approach but it risks your never getting a plug-in if you and everyone else take this sit and wait approach.

Obviously, there is a #1A where you just drive your truck for 5 years, in which case you'll spend $11,600 on gas and the $35K for the plug-in for a total of $46,600.

On the other hand, this is probably the only time in the history of the planet when a person can justify spending $100K on an exotic supercar in the name of saving the planet (it gets the equivalent of over 130 mpg but can out handle and accelerate any Porche or Lamborgini and most Ferrari's).

Are you sure you want to pass up this opportunity :-)

Of course, if your just dying to get a new car and you've got your sights set on hypermiling in a Prius, HCH, FEH, etc, there's no shame in just going for it either. You're still sending a very clear message the auto makers that you want economy and you're willing to spend the money for it.

Any option is a good option. (how often can you say that :-)

Good luck with your decision. The very fact that you and enough other people are making these concious decisions is scaring the daylights out of the gasoline automakers and spinning venture capitalists and investors into a frizzy to invest in plug-in vehicles!

its funny that you bash marketing companies... Toyota's latest Prius commercial (marketing) claims that you can save somewhere around 13 thousand in fuel savings. How is this possible?

If you are realy for saving the environment, you would look at things like how much energy it takes to recycle. There is a reason they are willing to pay you for aluminum and not for paper or plastic after all, because it takes less energy to recycle aluminum then it does to dig out and process the bauxite into aluminum... hence, they pay you for their savings in energy. Paper, plastic, and most things people recycle, uses more energy to recycle then it saves... otherwise they would pay you to bring in your paper bags.

Also, if you were REALY REALY for saving the environment, you would not buy a hybrid at all. what you would do would be perhaps, buy a a Salvaged automobile and repair it? instead of re-processing the material for a huge energy loss, you would Re-Use the entire thing. In one action, you would do more for the environment then you could ever do with a lifetime of recycling Aluminum cans (the one thing that takes less energy to recycle remember).

Or perhaps instead of spending 20k on a Prius, you would spend 5k on a used economy car, and spend 15k in a donation to an environmental organization... which I don't believe is a good choice, looking at the sizes of most of their "non profit" headquarters...

bottom line, you actually have to think for your self when it comes to doing good for the environment. I have several cars...

01 Pontiac Trans Am with 350 wheel horse power (which believe it or not, kids, is an Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle. Look it up.)
95 Chevy Tahoe (with 290k miles, doesn't burn any oil)
04 Pontiac Grand Prix Supercharged
99 Dodge Neon (purchased the shell of the car on its way to be crushed, and am rebuilding it using parts from other cars)
93 Chevy Cavalier (purchased with engine problems, the owner was going to junk it. Its running fine now)

So, you can see, even though I own alot of vehicles that burn a reasonable amount of dead dinos (the trans am gets about 16mpg the way I drive it) There is far more to think about when it comes to the Environment then just how much gas it uses...

Otherwise you are like one of those suckers who thinks CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas. (Water Vapor accounts for about 80% of the greenhouse effect, yet some think hydrogen cars that exhaust nothing but "harmless water vapor are grand). You need to look this stuff up for your selves... and don't be so quick to claim "oh, they are just a stooge for the automotive industry" or "big oil." Otherwise, every time someone brings out something published by an environmental group, you need to point out that group's extreme Bias as well. its best to look at all the data and come up with your own conclusion, not to ignore data because you don't like what it says. Toyota, after all, is the largest (now) automotive company... have you started looking into their CEO's profits lately? Where is the Critism section in wikipedia like there is for GM or Exxon or Nestle?

And, as we all know, NASA has tested a ton of moon rovers since the Prius was released. :rolleyes:

Okay, so maybe it's still the same factory that NASA used to test moon rovers in the sixties. Is it really still using the same mining techniques? If the area was made a "dead zone" by the mine before half the folks designing the Prius were even born, can we really blame the Prius?

That, off the top of my head, suggests that the "evidence" being pushed in this article is empty rhetoric disguised by a jumble of misapplied and distorted facts.

The batteries will be recycled along with 95% of the rest of the car. Cars are probably the most recycled product on the market and hybrids are no exception. The only issue is that most of the hybrids that have been built are still on the road with their original batteries.

Does any American made car make it to 300k miles? How about 200k? 100k?

I guess if you spread the cost of the Hummer over 1 million miles it would look even greener. In 10 years people will have to go to Wikipedia or a museum to see a Hummer. Our Priuses will be still on the road with replaced (more efficient) higher capacity battery packs.

Did I say 10 years? Make that 5 years to no more hummers.