TOTO opens its expanded Morrow manufacturing facility

The Georgia opening

TOTO opened a $224 million factory expansion in Morrow, Georgia, on 22 August 2025. Production was scheduled for the autumn. The company said local manufacturing would shorten delivery times for one-piece toilets previously supplied mainly from its Asian plants.

Annual design capacity: 300,000 units.
U.S. production-capacity increase: 150%.
Three-storey facility: 363,393 square feet.

An established manufacturing network

The company’s corporate backgrounder traces its origins to the founding of TOTO in Kitakyushu, Japan, in 1917. TOTO USA was established in California in 1989, which the document links to drought and demand for water conservation. Its first Morrow factory opened in 1996 to manufacture residential plumbing products. The backgrounder describes three major North American production facilities: Morrow and Lakewood in Georgia, and Ciénega de Flores in Nuevo Leon, Mexico. It also identifies assembly, warehousing and distribution centres in Fairburn, Georgia, and Ontario, California, within the company’s regional network.

Existing ceramic production processes

A public life-cycle assessment prepared for TOTO USA by Gary Soe in August 2024 described the existing plants’ production processes. Morrow used machine casting and an extensive conveyor system, whereas casting at Lakewood was manual. The report specified drying for 30–35 hours at 60 degrees Celsius and firing for 12–18 hours, reaching 1,200 degrees Celsius at the hottest point. It described Morrow’s kiln as less than twenty years old and said heat was redirected from the kiln to the dryer to save gas. These descriptions concerned the report’s existing manufacturing operations.

Previously announced environmental targets

The manufacturing expansion followed a separate environmental-policy announcement. On 1 May 2024, TOTO said its greenhouse-gas targets had received validation from the Science Based Targets initiative at the 1.5 degrees Celsius level. Relative to a 2021 baseline, the company targeted a 47.5% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from business sites, covering Scope 1 and Scope 2, and a 25% reduction in product-use emissions under Scope 3, Category 11, by 2030. The announcement also set a goal of using entirely renewable energy by 2040, alongside the company’s broader carbon-neutrality objective for 2050.