Toyota develops new flower species to offset CO2 at Prius plant

[Danny]

A new story entry has been added:

Toyota develops new flower species to offset CO2 at Prius plant

Pretty interesting article over on The Age about Toyota's efforts to decrease CO2 emissions at it's Prius plant in Japan.
<blockquote>Toyota has created a new plant species designed to offset the CO2 created by its Prius assembly operations.
Toyota has created two flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere.
The flowers, derivatives of the cherry sage plant and the gardenia, were specially developed for the grounds of Toyota

[Rybold]

Awesome!

When I was in school, I worked on research for genetically-modified rice plants that produce more starch per plant (and therefore remove more CO2 from the atmosphere - but our main goal was just to produce more food per plant). It's awesome stuff and very do-able. It's very complex and requires complete dedication (it needs to be your full occupation in life), but it's certainly do-able.
I had no idea Toyota would be involved in this. I'm assuming they simply wrote a check (grant) to a university that was already working on this in exchange for allowing Toyota to advertise that they were a part of it.