Toyota Leans Into Water Conservation In Plants, Now On TV

Toyota promoted quality before its time in the U.S. market, created a vanguard of American manufacturing by Asian automakers, and made hay with a production system that’s valued by companies that have nothing to do with making cars.

Now, Toyota is attempting to steal a march on the rest of the auto industry by promoting its concern with dwindling water resources. At a time of repeated headlines about western wildfires, sandbar-revealing lake rescissions, and threats of a boiling-hot summer for much of the nation, the company’s attention to and concern for water conservation in its manufacturing — and as a marketing message — is timely.

Toyota is highlighting its own efforts in the context of the broader problem in a new TV program that has aired recently on the Science Channel, MotorTrend TV and on demand on the Discovery Science Go app.

“This is not a patting-our-selves-on-the-back kind of thing,” Kevin Butt, senior director for environmental sustainability for the Plano, Texas-based North American arm of the Japanese automaker, told me about the show, “Water: We Have Too Much, But Not Enough.”

“It’s how we share information and get the word out. There’s such a thing as asking people to join a cause that has a lot of merit to it. We don’t want [society] to be in a position again where we’re only in a reactive mode to another of the environmental issues we’ve had over the years.”

Industry uses about 19% of the fresh water in the United States, agriculture 70% and households just 11%, meaning that manufacturers’ usage could be targeted, especially in water-parched areas like the West, if climate change, extreme weather, poor water management and other factors continue to exacerbate America’s fresh-water situation.

“There are risks out there” to manufacturing, Butt said. “The first place water is going to be cut off is probably the golf course, but then it’s going to get to manufacturing. We have to continue to work to make this a focused area for industry.”

Just as marketers, product developers and other commercial interests have joined politicians and environmental activists in beating the drum over climate change generally, and greenhouse-gas emissions specifically, Toyota is probably on the leading edge of the next phase of corporate conscious-raising in this arena: focusing on water. That means, first, ensuring it’s on top of its own water usage before trumpeting its approach to everyone else.

Valuing water and its costs in manufacturing is crucial. “Calculations are often just based on, ‘We’re [only] going to save a gallon of water and that only costs us a penny,’” Mark Yaimuchi, Toyota North America’s environmental sustainability manager, told me. “But that’s just the commodity cost of water. Then start looking at the true value of water — every gallon you purchase has to be treated, processed, pumped, moved and filtered — those costs get multiplied several times. Understand the real value of water to help with those payback calculations.”

Toyota has been installing reverse-osmosis water-purification equipment as part of its emphasis on re-using every gallon of water in its facilities. “We’ve got to be more efficient in that area, and technology is the answer,” Butt said. Yaimuchi added, “We’re continually cleaning our water internally to make multiple passes of water through our manufacturing system.”

Toyota’s plant in Baja California, Mexico, is a focus of the TV program because it is one of the company’s most water-stressed plants in the world, in large part because of its location in a part of the continent that has been dealing with severe drought for several years and is basically desertified in the first place. The company has focused much of its initial effort on that plant, including understanding its relationship to the local and regional watershed.

“We always knew we were withdrawing water from the local reservoir, fully permitted and working with local water agencies,” Yaimuchi says. “Then we realized that our water is actually fed through a canal system from the Colorado River delta, which connects that water to everything upstream in the United States that we’ve been hearing about. And the reservoir also feeds local communities such as Tecate [Mexico]. We have an obligation to understand how that reservoir needs to support those communities.”

Much of the worldwide success of Japanese companies in manufacturing has been to transfer their homegrown philosophy of unrelenting, steady, incremental improvement to their operations and workforces everywhere. That certainly applies to improving utilization of water. “We are never satisfied,” Yaimuchi said. “It doesn’t end. Kaizen is continuous improvement. That’s kind of the challenge and the fun of it. You always find something. You don’t stop.”