Cutting costs with cold, hard cash
When carmakers talk about putting money into their vehicles, they usually mean investing in new models or factories. Ford hopes to be more direct about it.
Every year in the United States, millions of kilograms of torn and tattered currency is shredded and sent to landfill. It is, says Ellen Lee, a wasted resource.
The greenbacks contain long cotton and linen fibres, with “really good mechanical properties” for being recycled into “very durable” car parts, says Lee, team leader for plastics research at Ford’s Dearborn, Mich., headquarters. They could go into door panels or under-hood components.
In my column last week, I started the story of how Ford, often collaborating with universities, is researching how Russian dandelions, tomato skins and other alternative materials, mostly from plants, might replace petroleum-based plastics.
Lee says Ford is concentrating on things that are over-supplied, byproducts or wastes that, replacing or added to conventional materials, could improve performance while reducing weight, energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and costs. Preferably, they can be grown or sourced locally. The tomato skins would be castoffs from the production of Heinz ketchup in the United States. Bamboo fibre might be the option in China.
Natural materials often provide equal strength with less weight. Although a few take longer to mould, others require less time and lower temperatures, cutting energy consumption by up to 40 per cent.
Every year in the United States, millions of kilograms of torn and tattered currency is sent to landfill
Still, the search for alternatives has twists and turns: Every car contains dozens of plastics formulated for the specific demands of each part. To match them, researchers must investigate many new processing methods. Foam produced from soy (over-supplied for human and animal food in the United States) makes fine cushions and is used in all North-American-built Ford cars.
But it has limits: Instead of springing back right away, it retains the shape of the person who last used it. This makes it popular for memory-foam mattresses, but when it comes to car seats, “that’s not what customers are looking for,” Lee says.
So, for now, it must be combined with conventional foam, at a rate of just 5 to 12 per cent, depending on whether it’s in a seat, seat back or headrest.
That small percentage, though, replaces more than 2.2 kilograms of petroleum in a year and cuts greenhouse gas emissions by more than nine million kilograms, Lee says.
Several of these alternative materials are demonstrated in a Ford mock-up of a front door:
The main door panel contains wheat straw, which Lee calls one of her first successes. However, it will initially be used in storage bins.
An armrest handle is made from corn, based on a commercially available material that’s now being qualified for automotive use. It might be used first in floor mats or fabrics.
The upper armrest panel is made from soy-based foam.
The armrest panel is polypropylene, reinforced with fibres from wood chips. The material, in production, could be used for other interior structures, such as inside the centre console. With the decline in the use of paper, wood is in oversupply, Lee says.
The map pocket is a material called PLA, derived from corn, sweet potato or sugar beet. Frito Lay once used it to make chip bags, but abandoned it when buyers complained the packaging was too noisy. It still isn’t durable enough for automotive use, so researchers are working on modifying it or blending it with other materials.
A “crash block” is 100 per cent sugar cane. It works, but costs twice as much as the petro-plastic it would replace, so it’s not yet ready for prime time.
But Lee is especially fond of that shredded currency. She suggests it would be cute if its first use was in coin holders. wheels@thestar.ca