Engineering Cars to Engineering Plants - What Will They Come Up With Next?

A new craze that has engulfed our nation over the last few years has been the development and purchasing of hybrid vehicles. Cars such as the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight have raised many questions as to why we still have vehicles on the road that average less that 15 miles per gallon while the Prius and Insight are able to reach over 50. Such conversations have stirred such debate and have contributed to the research, funding and development of other vehicle types including purely electric vehicles. While Toyota and Honda have been model citizens in the race to a cleaner better tomorrow, Toyota, specifically, has been given much grief over how environmentally friendly their Prius plant was not - that is until now.

Toyota has recently engineered two new plant species in order to combat that carbon emissions from its Prius plant located in Japan. Toyota created a variation of the cherry sage plant to absorb greenhouse gases and a version of the gardenia plant that creates water vapor to help cool the factory. This new engineering scheme has helped to reduce the CO2 emissions from the Toyota Prius plant by 55 percent over the last twenty years. While some may argue that Toyota shouldn't be tinkering with nature, I believe that this is yet another path that we may take to counterbalance our environmental follies and once again, it seems as though Toyota is leading the way.