TMMTX San Antonio Toyota Tundra FactoryWe recently found a nice description of the San Antonio Tundra plant, known as TMMTX in Toyota-speak, on Toyota’s Open Road blog. Here’s a summary:

The plant was built to create up to 150,000 new Tundras each year with its crew of 2,000 team members. It augments an existing plant in Indiana, in operation since 1999, which also assembles Tundras.

Texas was chosen because it’s the capital of pickup sales in the United States – in fact, roughly one of every seven pickups sold in the U.S. is sold in Texas. San Antonio was chosen because of it’s great access to rail and highway networks.

Toyota plant managers received more than 100,000 applications for the plant’s 2,000 jobs.

In order to build the plant, the constructors had to move 6.5 million cubic yards of dirt, pour 250,000 yards of concrete (enough to pave a two-lane highway 53 miles long), erect 15,000 tons of steel, and install 10 acres of siding.

The total cost of the plant was $1.28 billion.

The result of the investment is a 2.2 million square feet (or 46 acre) main factory that can build about 750 Tundras per day.

Toyota Tundra truck is being assembled.It takes about 24 hours to complete a Tundra – that’s going from raw steel to finished, painted, rolling and running state-of-the-art pickup.

The San Antonio plant operates as what’s called a “zero-landfill facility”. This means is that no waste is being taken to a landfill. Instead, the plant recycles extensively. Scrap steel is returned to the steel mill, scrap plastic is shredded and returned to the plastic pellet manufacturer.

The pallets upon which parts are delivered are made of plastic instead of wood. That’s because wood breaks up and wears out, then must be disposed of in a landfill. Plastic can be used more than wood, and when these plastic pallets are completely worn out, they’re recycled.

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