Toyota has been tying the image of plants to their Prius for a long time—there were the solar powered flowers they set up in U.S. cities to promote it, the billboards they created for the car out of plants, and the greenery-heavy print and TV ads (like the one pictured above). But now the company has taken their love of plants a step further and tapped real flowers to help reduce the C02 emissions of their Prius manufacturing plant in Toyota City, Japan (yes, that’s the real name).

The C02 combating flowers have been genetically engineered from the cherry sage and gardenia plants to improve the environmental impact of the Prius plant in two ways: First, by absorbing nitrogen oxides from the air and second, by creating water vapor, which—in theory—should cool the area around the factory. Unfortunately, few details are available on exactly how much positive effect these flowers can be expected to have and it’s not clear whether the genetic modification was a necessary step, as both the plants that have been modified had those properties to begin with (and probably could have been planted together).

Anti-pollution flowers aren’t the first step Toyota has taken to get greener with its Prius building. The company has been revamping its Toyota City factory for some time in an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of building the Prius (a process that creates more C02 than building a conventional car). The Prius plant features rooftop solar panels, air purifying photocatalytic paint, solar tubes for interior light and special grass that only needs to be mowed once a year. Through their efforts, Toyota has managed to reduce the plant’s C02 emissions by 55% since 1990.

Some critics are saying that Toyota’s new flowers, however, are little more than greenwashing and saying that the benefits of the plants will be so minimal they’re not relevant, but any positive effect helps and if Toyota’s willing to get as thorough as to start greening the greenery, why should anyone stop them? We just hope they’re as hard at work on alternatives to the Prius earth-stripping elements like nickel as they are on plant research.

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