Automaker launches several projects to make its vehicles more planet-friendly.

As vehicles continue to be responsible for a significant portion of the world’s pollution, Ford Motor Company is part of a growing list of automakers trying to make their companies more environmentally sustainable.
“Our planet is in crisis,” said Debbie Mielewski, Ford’s Technical Fellow of Sustainability at the Altair Future Industry event on October 20. “Our world’s wildlife populations have decreased by two-thirds in the past 50 years. 300 million tons of plastic waste are produced every single year, and that material is left with us for centuries to come. People are consuming about 70,000 pieces of micro-plastic, potentially affecting their health and wellness. A million marine animals are killed by plastic pollution in the oceans every year, and our Arctic could be free of ice by the year 2040.”
In light of the grim outlook, Ford has launched its Ford Plus initiative to electrify 40 percent of its vehicles by 2030. While electrification is vital to reducing carbon emissions, it doesn’t address the sustainability gaps associated with vehicle production. Since 2007, when it began using soy-based foams in vehicles, Ford has been scaling up the use of agricultural by-products as substitutes for synthetic parts. The company is now looking at using castor, palm and algae-based foams and expanding natural fibers such as tree cellulose, wheat straw and coconut fibers in things like floor mats.
In 2018, Ford implemented a console substrate that included tree fibers, which reduced the overall console weight, thus improving fuel economy and lowering production costs.
“Our team is incredibly inspired by trees,” said Mielewski. “It’s the most abundant biological plant-based material on the planet. There are many sources of products from the lumber industry that we can utilize. Our initial success using tree-based cellulose fiber was in a Lincoln product in an armrest substrate where we replaced 100 percent of the fiberglass with cellulose fiber from trees.”
What makes agricultural byproducts especially appealing for vehicles is that much of it currently goes to waste. For example, coffee roasting causes the skin to peel off beans, piling up as a byproduct called chaff that’s either sent to a landfill or burned. So, Ford partnered with McDonald’s to salvage the chaff used and create a polypropylene material that replaces some of the talc used in headlamp housings. The move helps reduce vehicle weights and provides an alternative to the environmental degradation caused by talc mining.
Ford struck another unlikely partnership with tequila-maker Jose Cuervo. It turns out that the piñas of the agave plant used to make tequila are left after the juicing process and either burnt or used as animal bedding. So instead, the automaker uses the agave fiber in polypropylene for various components such as window mechanisms.
The hull portion of rice grown in the U.S. Southeast is left behind after harvest as waste. Ford’s interest in the rice hulls is due to its high silicate content, which performs well in fire resistance applications. The company uses the byproduct to produce low-weight electrical brackets that have better fire resistance than synthetic alternatives.
The move toward more sustainable materials goes beyond using agricultural byproducts. For example, Ford is amping up its use of recycled auto parts. Currently, it uses about a billion plastic water bottles per year in underbody shields and discarded jeans in noise absorption materials.
Additionally, the backing of old carpet is removed so that the nylon fibers can be used in under-hood applications. Mielewski said that 10 million pounds of recycled carpet have been used in vehicles over the past decade. Ford also prioritizes the use of recycled aluminum for trucks like the F-150.
While these changes are laudable, they’re a drop in the bucket of what industries must do to protect the environment. One major problem is ocean waste, such as fishing nets killing an array of marine wildlife. Ford is currently experimenting with collecting ocean waste to replace clips on some wiring channels.
Another area of problematic waste is some 3D printing methods that use lasers to cure powder. Such processes can waste up to 50 percent of the powder used. Ford is working on collecting its powder waste, reformulating it into injection molding pellets and using the pellets to produce fuel line clips for F-250, F-350 and F-450 truck models.

Other sustainability measures are still in development, such as Ford’s Project Blue Sky, which converts carbon emissions into vehicle components, but only on a small scale. There’s also a Nanoplant project in which the company is trying to reinforce plant fibers through the root uptake of nano cellulose particles.
Despite Ford’s big push toward converting to electric vehicles, Mielewski said the lack of efficient battery recycling is troubling, as the extraction of minerals like cobalt and lithium used in EV batteries is devastating the earth. However, current battery recycling processes require the use of chemicals, water and massive amounts of heat.
“This is going to be critical to make certain that the battery revolution won’t just replace one problem, global warming, with another—the devastation of the planet through landfill and mining,” said Mielewski.