Ford EcoSport is plastic fantastic | Car Talk - Car News Jun 2019

11:12 Friday 03 Sep 2021

Ford has shown it has the bottle to tackle the issue of plastic waste.

The carpets in each Ford EcoSport SUV produced by Ford contain recycled waste from 470 single-use plastic drinks bottles. Ford has released a short video on its youtube channel to highlight the innovative process, which involves shredding both the bottles and their caps into tiny flakes, heating them to 260°C, and melting them down into fibres the width of a single human hair that are then spun and woven into carpets.

“Consumers have a hugely increased awareness of the harm that simply discarding plastic can do – but we have long been on a mission to increase the proportion of recycled and renewable materials that are used in every new car we make,” explained Tony Weatherhead, materials engineer at Ford Motor Company.

In Europe only 30 per cent of plastic waste is recycled, but Ford pioneered the use of recycled plastics in the car manufacturing process with the Mondeo more than two decades ago, and is now responsible for recycling 1.2 billion plastic bottles globally each year. The EcoSport was launched in 2012, and since then has provided a new lease of life for more than 650 million 500-millilitre bottles, weighing an estimated 8,262 metric tons.

Ford’s video about the plastic recycling process can be viewed here https://youtu.be/-2ykmGsYUeU