Didn't See This One Coming

By | March 21, 2007
11 Comments

It appears that a Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer:

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.

Well, okay, sure, but driving a Prius feels like a good thing to do for the environment, and that’s what really matters, right?

Via GeekPress.

  • blacknail

    Uh…

    Killjoy!

    At what point do we stop this crap and just live our lives. So now, in order to feel that warm fuzzy an-inconvenient-truth buzz about driving, we have to track the parts down to the subatomic level and make sure no pygmy owls were harmed in supply chain. OK, so there’s the battery. What about the tires, the plastic, the glass, the computer chips, and let’s not forget all the smart people it took to envision, design, build, and market all those lovely machines. I imagine those guys chewed up a lot of the environment along the way too. Let’s burn every car down to the last drop of energy it took to build it, bring it to market, and use and see which one is best for the environment. While the best might not be a Prius, it sure as ef aint a Hummer. And since when does a Hummer last 300K miles? Since when does any car last that long?

    If I were to truly feel bad about a Prius, my head would explode thinking about the crap and waste that surrounds everyday routine living. Hell, right here in my office I’ve got 4 computers, two monitors, phones, lights, and assorted chunks of plastic littered all over the place. And that’s just on my side of the room. The hum is deaffening. And for what? To write of few lines of something for something else? Impossible.

    Calling out Toyota for using nickel in their batteries is a bit like the Greenpeace girl collecting signatures to save the whales, while stomping around in leather hiking boots with Vibram soles.

  • Jim Strickland

    And let’s make sure we boycott Canadian change, too. After all, their nickels probably get nickel from the same place.

    C’mon, Phil. This article is FUD. It’s obviously FUD. It doesn’t belong on a site that’s promoting that the future will be better.

  • Phil Bowermaster

    Jim,

    I don’t think it’s FUD so much as neat example of the law of unintended consequences. Everybody wants to do right by the environment, but it will probably prove trickier than we thought. Like people eating trans-fat-drenched margarine all those years thinking they were doing right by their hearts.

    Blacknail,

    Of course, we’re always delighted to hear from you, but I’ve warned you and warned you about writing comments when you’re not on your meds.

    BTW, the battery was the point of the quote I pulled, but not the point of the article overall. It goes more to the “crap and waste that surrounds everyday routine living.” You know, the sort of stuff that might just make a fella’s head explode.

  • blacknail

    Just for the record, I’m not off my meds; just a severe relapse. These tend to come every other month or so (which also happens to coincide with the frequency of my Speculist posts). The only thing that really helps is a good dousing with LITs. Then I collapse on the bathroom floor and giggle like a little girl for a few hours before throwing up. Morning after is a real downer. Thereby completing the cycle.

  • http://www.liftport.com/progress/wp bdunbar

    So now, in order to feel that warm fuzzy an-inconvenient-truth buzz about driving, we have to track the parts down to the subatomic level and make sure no pygmy owls were harmed in supply chain.

    Well .. yes that’s what living and working Green is all about – knowing what your impact, yea unto the nth generation.

    It’s not Phil’s fault if doing so reveals that a car marketed as being Good for the environment really isn’t so much when compared to a car that is Bad for the environment.

    It’s the last that is what makes this ‘fun’. For years you read how SUVs are evil, with Hummers held up as the King of Evil SUVs. It’s an article of faith that does not stand close inspection.

    Seeing a petard hoisted is always fun.

  • Karl Hallowell

    I side with the relapsing naysayers. The numbers are bogus. Expected lifetime mileage of a Hummer is 300,000 miles? Not for the commercial vehicle. For example, I just glanced at Kelly Blue Book. For a 1997 Hummer H1, the “typical mileage” is 87,000 miles. In comparison, the typical mileage for a 2001 Prius (first year it was offered) is 73,000. They have to be adding all those military vehicles in order to get 300,000 mile lifetimes.

    Second, they are claiming the total cost of the Prius is $325,000. Most that isn’t the cost of the car, maintenance, or fuel. So what is it? And who is paying this huge cost. It’s not any of the obvious parties otherwise they’d be bankrupt by now.;

    They claim its environmental pollution and other such external costs. Let me point out this. They talk a lot about the external costs associated with nickel (I guess to emphasize their point). Nickel currently goes for around $20 per pound. That’s hefty incentive to recycle the stuff. And you can bet that most of the nickel in a car will end up recycled. That drives down greatly the environmental costs for such metals.

    In summary, I don’t buy it. I’m sure there’s a lot of hidden costs and drawbacks to hybrids and related vehicles. But this study appears deceptive to me.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    I have to agree with bdunbar on this. If a car is going to be marketed as “green,” then it needs to be judged on that basis. Sort of like Al Gore. :-)

    Of course this doesn’t mean that we should give up on electric or hybrid cars. Perhaps we should just give up nickel-cadmium batteries.

    What’s the environmental impact of Lithium-ion batteries?

  • Karl Hallowell

    I guess my beef is that I don’t believe CNW Marketing has provided a fair or accurate picture of the total cost of ownership of a vehicle. 300,000 miles on a Hummer? There’s no indication from Kelly Blue Book that the vehicle breaks 100,000 miles for its lifetime.

    They also seem to ignore the recycling potential of nickel (or more accurately nickel cadmium or nickel hydride since recycling of nickel alloys appears to be mostly in kind). We’re told that Toyota uses 1000 tons of nickel a year and that this metal comes from a plant in Ontario. But actually only 30% of the world’s supply of nickel comes from this mine. And no indicate is given of how much of Toyota’s metal is recycled.

    Further, the author of the above linked story claims that when tested under the new EPA regs, the Prius’ gas mileage dropped by 25%. That is incorrect. It actually drops by 10-15% from 60/51 (city/highway) to 51/46. The Aveo is alleged to be within “spitting distance” in terms of gas mileage but I see that the gas mileage for one with a stick shift is 24/34.

    In summary, there’s too much wrong with the original study. And the report on the study (the link above) is far worse. There is considerable merit to evaluating environmental claims on their own basis, but this isn’t the way.

  • MDarling

    SPeaking of the law of unintended consequences- their math is off but you’re all forgetting or leaving out a critical component.
    That mine at Sudbury also houses one of the coolest intentional neutrino detectors. Now a neutrino dectector has little commercial application so far- and no “green” cred to speak of. But it’s so COOL! That’s gotta count for something.

  • MDarling

    Also- the article attributes all the impact of the nickel mine at Sudbury to the Prius.
    Hmm – that’s kind of like attributing all the impact of the Xcel coal plant that makes most of the electricity for my house to me….instead of attributing to all of the Xcel users proportionally.

    300,000 miles per Hummer?! No way. Not without 6-10 sets of tires, 2-3 transmissions, 2-3 engine rebuilds, and any amount of cosmetic work.
    That is not factored in.

    I mean I could claim my 55 Cadillac (RIP) could have lasted 300,000 miles too- and then it would have been far cheaper than anything on the road today. (I let it die when the only reliable parts supply was a hard to deal with junk yard in southern Idaho and I was livingin England.)

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