Efforts to reduce the waste through recycling have been made for years, and the American carmaker Ford is joining forces with a project to recycle plastic bottles into special fabrics for its cars.
Branded "Repreve", the seat fabric will be first used in new vehicles beginning with the 2012 Focus Electric. Focus Electric is the first vehicle with interior materials made of 100 per cent clean technology, including the use of Repreve recycled fibres. Seating in each vehicle interior uses roughly 22 recycled plastic bottles.
Bottles will be collected throughout this year, beginning with the North American International Auto Show and Consumer Electronics Show. The programme aims to divert about 2 million post-consumer plastic bottles from landfills, following the finding that only 29 per cent of plastic bottles are recycled in the United States - nearly half the rate as in Europe - despite decades of education.
"Ford is committed to delivering vehicles with leading fuel efficiency while targeting at least 25 per cent clean technology in interior materials across our line-up," says Carol Kordich, lead designer of Sustainable Materials for Ford. "The Focus Electric highlights this commitment as Ford's first gas-free vehicle, and the first in the automotive industry to use branded Repreve."
The collection of bottles will be carried out together with Unifi Inc.
"We hope this recycling initiative with Ford will help raise visibility about the importance of recycling with a goal to drive recycling rates to 100 per cent, diverting millions of plastic bottles from entering the waste stream and potentially back into Repreve-branded fibres," said Roger Berrier, president and chief operating officer of Unifi.
The new fabric is a polyester fibre made from a hybrid blend of recycled materials, including post-industrial fibre waste and post-consumer waste such as the plastic water bottles made of PET. Ford claims that Repreve will also help reduce energy consumption by offsetting the need to use newly refined crude oil for production.
"We aim to make the Focus Electric the most overall sustainable vehicle available to consumers, from using clean technology to overall vehicle efficiency," said Kordich.
The innovative fabric is expected to appear in the vehicle, after full production is underway in March.
The move follows Ford's "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle" commitment towards a global sustainability strategy, to reduce its environmental footprint while at the same time accelerating the development of advanced, fuel-efficient vehicle technologies around the world.
Currently Ford vehicles are approximately 90 per cent recyclable at end of life and Ford's goal is to make its vehicles 100 per cent recyclable.
In 2009, Ford mandated that fabric suppliers use a minimum of 25 per cent recycled content for all of 2009 and beyond model year vehicles. Since then, 37 different fabrics meeting the requirements have been developed and incorporated into Ford vehicles.
Examples include soy-foam seat cushions and head restraints, wheat straw-filled plastic, castor-oil foam in instrument panels, recycled resins for underbody systems, recycled yarns on seat covers and natural-fibre plastic for interior components.
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