Initiatives Aimed at Reducing Emissions to Improve Air Quality

Improving atmospheric quality will require measures that address both stationary sources of atmospheric pollution — plants and mobile sources like automobiles. Advances in technologies used in cleaning automobile exhaust emissions, including catalytic converters and air-fuel ratio compensation systems, have reduced automobile emissions during the use stage to about one one-hundredth over the past 30 years. Increased global motorization in conjunction with the economic growth of developing countries is, however, expected to result in increases in emissions of CO₂, NOx and other exhaust gases, and therefore further reduction efforts are needed.

Measures are also required to reduce VOC (volatile organic compounds) emissions at plants by switching to water-borne paints and reducing the volume of cleaning solvents used.

Toyota has included reducing emissions to improve urban air quality and reducing VOC emissions as action items in the Fourth Toyota Environmental Action Plan and is developing low emissions technologies and introducing low emissions vehicles according to the local conditions in various countries. Toyota is also promoting initiatives to reduce VOC emissions during production.