Letter: Prius, Hummer or Chevy? - NewsTimes.com

Letter: Prius, Hummer or Chevy? - NewsTimes.com

Is the Toyota Prius environmentally friendly or not? Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than building a Hummer.

A Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. The area around the plant is devoid of any form of 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 “super stack,” the plagued factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.

According to Canadian Greenpeace Energy Coordinator David Martin, “The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside.”

The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ships to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce nickel foam. Next, it goes to Japan.

Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the U.S., finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a Prius battery.

Are these sounding less and less like environmentally friendly cars and more like a farce? The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over the lifetime of 100,000 miles, the expected lifespan of a hybrid. The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more physical $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected life span of 300,000 miles.

That means the Hummer will last three times longer than the Prius and uses less combined energy doing it.
If you are really an environmentalist, ditch the Prius, buy a Chevy Aveo and fix your lead foot.

These facts do not include recycling the batteries at the end of their lives, which uses more energy than disposing of a Hummer.

Tom Falconieri

RIDGEFIELD

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