Green Car Advisor
Recycling
November 12, 2009
A couple of months ago we reported on Ford Motor Co.'s "bio-babes," the five highly educated female scientists who comprise the automaker's Biomaterials and Plastics Research team.
You might recall that their accomplishments included development of soy-based components that have since been installed in 1.5 million vehicles. With soy-based material making up about 40 percent of the foam used in such items as head restraints and armrests, Ford saves about a pound of petroleum for each car.
Today we are delighted to report that the scientists have "done it again," teaming with academic researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and parts supplier A. Schulman to develop and use wheat straw-reinforced plastic in Ford vehicles.
This world-first application, which is on the third-row storage bins of the 2010 Ford Flex, will reduce petroleum usage by 20,000 pounds per year and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 30,000 pounds per year, the automaker reported.
Moreover, Ford said it expects to expand the use of the material across multiple models in the company's quest to reduce its demand on petroleum-based products.
In addition to soy-based polyurethane seat cushions, seatbacks and headliners, Ford's sustainable-materials portfolio includes post-industrial recycled yarns for seat fabrics, and post-consumer recycled resins for underbody systems, such as the new engine cam cover on the 2010 Ford Escape's 3.0-liter V-6 engine.
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- Scott Doggett November 12, 2009, 1:01 AM
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- Ford, Recycling
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- 2010 Ford Flex
, Biomaterials, Ford Motor Co, Wheat Straw
November 10, 2009
Love those leather seats in your Bimmer so much you want to take 'em inside when you park the car.
Well now you can, sort of.
A Maryland-based company that makes floor and wall covering from recycled leather scrap says that the company that supplies BMW's leather upholstery is now supplying it with scraps.
EcoDomo LLC, a 5-year-old company out of Rockville, Md., uses scrap leather, tree bark and natural latex to manufacture high-end floor and wall tiles with, it says, the look and feel of leather, the resilience of cork and the wear characteristics of hardwood flooring.
Spokesman Christian Nadeau - on his way to the Greenbuild 2009 sustainable bulding materials expo in Phoenix, Ariz. (Wednesday through Friday this week) - told Green Car Advisor that one of the company's suppliers is a major European upholstery products manufacturer that does not only BMW seats but leather seats for several other automakers as well.
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- John O'Dell November 10, 2009, 1:45 PM
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- BMW, Recycling
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- Leather Upholstery Recycling
November 4, 2009
Recycling at work: Trash hauler Waste Management Inc. says it will be able to produce up to 13,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas daily to fuel 300 of its trash trucks using methane gas from decomposing garbage at one of its large Northern California landfill dumps.
The company, which has been involved in waste-to-energy programs for nearly 40 years, has installed a $15.5 million biogas collection and refining system at its Altamont Landfill near Livermore in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The German-made system removes impurities from the methane and chills it to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit to liquefy it so it can be pumped directly into the trash trucks' tanks.
We can't help but wonder how many gallons a weekly residential curbside garbage can would be good for and whether there's any future in, say, neighborhood waste-to-gas programs? Perhaps a monthly voucher good for your garbage's equivalent of LNG at the local dump pump?
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- John O'Dell November 4, 2009, 9:43 AM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Biofuels, Natural Gas, Recycling
- Technorati Tags:
- Biogas
, Gas From Trash, Liquefied Natural Gas, LNG, Methane, Waste Management Inc.
October 7, 2009
Poo power raises its banner again as a Massachusetts biofuels company and an Israeli water recycling firm announce a joint venture to turn biomass into cellulosic ethanol.
The companies, Qteros, of Marlborough, Mass., and Applied Clean Tech, of Israel, aren't the first to find that the gunk in sewage can be fermented into fuel, but they've got a novel approach.
Applied CleanTech has developed a process for recycling "wastewater solids," the stuff we inelegantly call poop, into a low-moisture feedstock for ethanol production. Qteros has developed what it believes is a better bug -a proprietary microbe technology for turning biomass into ethanol.
By teaming up, the two figure to be able to market to "every municipality that has a waste water treatment plant," said Jeff Haustor, Qteros' co-founder and manager of the project. the plants can use their accumulated waste to produce fuel that could be used in city-owned vehicles,
"It also helps answer the question of what municipalities can do with their sewage sludge," added Israel Biran, ACT's chief executive (We found one a while ago that was turning it into hydrogen for fuel-cell electic cars!)
The companies say their process improved cellulosic ethanol plant efficiency by up to 20 percent because the reclaimed sludge is easier to convert than other, woody biomass feedstocks.
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- John O'Dell October 7, 2009, 2:55 AM
- Categories:
- Biofuels, Ethanol, Recycling
- Technorati Tags:
- Cellulosic Ethanol
, Fuel From Sewers, Sewage Recycling
September 18, 2009
By Danny King, Contributor
Unlike many men, Dr. Debbie Mielewski (right) has no love or nostalgia for that "high school woodshop" smell. And that's a good thing.
The soy-based material that Mielewski, the technical leader of Ford Motor Co.'s Biomaterials and Plastics Research team, helped develop a few years ago as a supplement to the petroleum-based polyurethane was strong and pliable enough to be used in components such as car seats but also emitted what she described as a "woodshop" smell after being processed.
Still, the five-member Biomaterials team, which Mielewski started in 2001, eventually figured out a way to strip away the smell in time for the soy-based foam to be used in Ford Mustangs starting in August 2007.
"Our objective is to pass every requirement that exists for traditional material," Mielewski told Green Car Advisor. "We will either meet or beat that standard."
Since the first soy-foam installation two years ago, Ford has installed soy-based foam components in about 1.5 million vehicles, including Mustangs, Ford Focuses, Lincoln Navigators and Mercury Mariners. With soy-based material making up about 40 percent of the foam used in such items as head restraints and armrests, Ford saves about a pound of petroleum for each car.
The installations are the first stage of what appears to be a broader effort by Ford, the only major U.S. carmaker to avoid bankruptcy, to make its cars with less environmentally harmful materials such as petroleum and glass, carry less weight in plastics to improve fuel economy and take less time to decompose in landfill once the car's usable life is through.
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- Scott Doggett September 18, 2009, 4:10 PM
- Categories:
- Ford, Fuel Economy, Recycling
- Technorati Tags:
- Biomaterials
, Conservation, Ford Motor Co., Fuel Economy, Fuel Efficiency, Landfill, Recycling
July 24, 2009
Well, not actually here, but by following this link to Edmunds.com's comprehensive Cash for Clunkers Center.
Why?
Because the program isn't all that easy.
For one thing, a clunker under this law isn't what you'd think it would be: the definition has little to do with age or condition and everything to do with your present car's combined EPA fuel economy rating (although age does matter a little as cars older than 25 years aren't eligible).
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- John O'Dell July 24, 2009, 11:35 AM
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- Fuel Economy, Recycling
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- Cash for Clunkers
July 22, 2009
The new Cash for Clunkers program is going to produce a lot of automotive junk, and junk automobiles, that will be headed for the junk yard.
That's good news on many fronts, but bad news for our over-used landfills, which already get about 5 million tons of automotive recycling residue a year - steel, plastics, glass and even wood that's left over after all the useable parts of a junked auto are pulled off its carcass and sent to the recyclers.
The remaining stuff is shredded and this shredder residue is carted off to the dump, adding to the growing problem of what to do with all the trash our affluent nation produces.
Scientists at Argonne Nartional Laboratory have been working on a solution for several years and have built a pilot plant to further sift and sort shredder residue to find even more stuff that can be recycled.
The video above, released today by the national lab, shows how it's done.
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- John O'Dell July 22, 2009, 1:42 PM
- Categories:
- Recycling
- Technorati Tags:
- Automobile Recycling
, Car Recycling
June 3, 2009
Today may be the last opportunity for environmentalists to regain some of the ground lost as cash for clunkers legislation has morphed from being a green measure aimed at removing the dirtiest and lease fuel-efficient vehicles from the road to being a tool to boost flagging new car sales.
As the U.S. Senate tackles the issue of paying consumers to take older, dirtier and less-efficient cars and trucks off the road, senators will be asked to vote on two measures - one favored by green groups, the other by the auto industry.
Both measures would require that vehicles traded-in be sent to the scrap yard and both would permit the trade-in voucher to be combined with manufacturers' incentives when buying a new car ot truck.
The bill that appears to have the best chance, S.1135 by Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, closely parallels a measure that has stalled in the House but is being backed by President Obama.
It would establish a government-funded program to encourage people to send their gas guzzlers to the scrap yard by offering "trade-in" vouchers worth either $3,500 or $4,500 toward a new car or truck, depending on the fuel economy improvement it would represent.
Cars to be scrapped would have to have EPA combined fuel economy ratings of 18 miles per gallon or less, and new cars would have to get at least 22 miles per gallon.
The gap between trade-in and new vehicle narrows and finally disappears in the truck categories: The owner of a heavy duty work truck could get a $3,500 voucher by trading it in for a vehicle of the same or lesser weight, even if the new truck offered no improvement in fuel economy.
A counter-measure to be introduced by California Democrat Sen. Diane Feinstein and several co-authors would lower the maximum fuel economy for cars and trucks to be traded-in and raise the minimum fuel economy for new vehicles to be purchased.
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- John O'Dell June 3, 2009, 2:40 AM
- Categories:
- Fuel Economy, Recycling, Tax Incentives
- Technorati Tags:
- Cash for Clunkers
, Debbie Stabenow, Diane Feinsten, Scrappage Bills
April 22, 2009
Consider it an Earth Day celebration of sorts.
The United Kingdom today joined the growing number of countries that are offering cash or tax incentives to consumers who agree to scrap their old cars and trucks and buy new vehicles.
The "scrappage" plan announced Wednesday by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling follows the lead of such European countries as Germany, France and Italy, which earlier announced similar programs that are designed to rev up stalled automotive industry sales.
On this side of the pond, Congress is considering an Obama administration plan that's been dubbed "cash for clunkers."
Depending upon how such a program is structured, it could be effective when it comes to stimulating new vehicle sales and getting older, dirtier cars and trucks off of the road. But we maintain that participation should voluntary. The government shouldn't penalize car collectors, rebuilders, hobbyists and others who have solid reasons for owning old vehicles.
The U.S. proposal has won endorsements from the United Autoworkers and the country's Big Three automakers. Goldman Sachs estimates that cash-for-clunker proposals being considered by Congress could boost vehicle demand by 500,000 to 1.5 million during this year alone.
The U.K.'s auto industry certainly could use a push. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said that 313,912 new cars were registered in March in the U.K., a 30.5% drop from last year and the 11th consecutive monthly drop.
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- Greg Johnson April 22, 2009, 11:24 AM
- Categories:
- Emissions, France, Fuel Economy, Legislation, Recycling
- Technorati Tags:
- Cash for Clunkers
, Emissions, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom
January 27, 2009
We've already told you about Lotus using hemp and sisal
in its Eco Elise and Ford using oil from soybeans
in newer Mustangs, Expeditions and F-150 pickup trucks.
Now we're pleased to report that Yokohama Tire Corp. is using oil extracted from orange rinds in its ADVAN brand of ultra-high-performance street and racing tires.
The tires, which are produced using roughly 20 percent less synthetic rubber, will be used by all teams in the 2009 Patron GT3 Challenge six-race series that features Porsche 911 GT3 Cup racecars.
Yokohama has developed a process that combines orange oil with natural rubber to form a new compound the tire company calls Super Nano-Power RubberT. The proprietary technology reduces the amount of petroleum used in tires without, Yokohama claims, compromising the performance characteristics of conventional race tires.
Yokohama's Motorsports division began researching this technology in the late 1980s. Development was recently accelerated as part of the company's global environmental strategy.
In addition to requiring less petroleum in the manufacturing process, the tires result in lower rolling resistance, which increases the fuel-efficiency of the vehicles using them. Use of the orange oil also improves the tires' "recyclability," company spokesmen said.
Kudos to Yokohama for making our planet a little more renewable.
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- Scott Doggett January 27, 2009, 9:35 AM
- Categories:
- Fuel Economy, Porsche, Recycling, Tires
- Technorati Tags:
- Fuel Efficiency
, Recycling, Super Nano-Power RubberT, Yokohama Tire Corp.
December 22, 2008
A double-barreled idea that could help clean up our air and give a breath of life to a gasping auto industry is being pushed by the top Democrat and top Republican members of the House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee.
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Recycling older, dirtier cars can create jobs, help clean the air and generate new-car sales.
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It's not a new concept, and its execution needs to be carefully thought out to prevent it from becoming punitive to car collectors, rebuilders and hobbyists, but the congressmen's call for a "cash for clunkers" program might be the start of something worthwhile.
Reps. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the subcommittee, and Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who serves as its ranking member, are calling on President-elect Barack Obama to set aside a portion of his economic stimulus plan to pay Americans to hand over older, dirtier cars in return for cash they could use to buy clean, fuel efficient new models.
The two haven't put a pricetag on their proposal, but in a July column in the New York Times, Princeton economics professor and former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alan S. Blinder suggested a similar plan and said it could cost about $20 billion to retire 5 million old cars by paying owners $4,000 each for them.
That's a better use of taxpayer money than giving banks $350 billion so they can salt it away in their vaults and refuse to lend it to anyone who might actually need a loan.
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- John O'Dell December 22, 2008, 12:01 AM
- Categories:
- Emissions, Fuel Economy, Recycling
- Technorati Tags:
- Cash for Clunkers
, Economic Stimulus, Fred Upton, House Energy & Clean Air Subcommittee, Rich Boucher
October 9, 2008
University of Florida officials will cut the ribbon Friday on a research pilot plant that will convert a range of hearty, nonfood feedstocks into cellulosic ethanol.
The $2.5 million plant, paid for with state funds and located on the university's Gainesville campus, will be used to train graduate students in biofuel production, purification and testing.
Researchers will use acid to pre-treat shredded sugarcane bagasse, rice hulls, wood chips and other biomass. The feedstock will be fed into a stomach-like reactor, which will use heat, steam and enzymes to disintegrate the biomass's cellulosic structure.
The remaining sugary syrup will be fed into a fermenter full of bacteria to make fuel, said microbiology professor Lonnie Ingram (pictured).
Researchers will test specialty enzymes developed by Ingram and licensed to Boston-based Verenium Corp.
The research facility, slated for completion next year, could produce up to 2 million gallons of fuel annually from bagasse and other local biomass.
Ingram estimates that the state's lawns, orange groves, sugar cane farmers and forests produce as much as 124 million tons of biomass per year.
That's enough, in theory, to make 10 billion gallons of ethanol. And that ethanol would be made without the significant expenditures on fertilizer, herbicides and diesel fuel devoted to growing corn.
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- Scott Doggett October 9, 2008, 11:46 AM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Biofuels, Energy Companies, Ethanol, Recycling
- Technorati Tags:
- Cellulosic Ethanol
, Corn, Lonnie Ingram, Sugarcane Bagasse, University of Florida, Verenium Corp.
September 5, 2008
Hoping to get some notice for a green-up campaign it has been conducting for some time now, General Motors Corp. today pledged that at least one half of its 161 manufacturing plants worldwide would be "landfill-free" facilities by the end of 2010.
The carmaker already has 43 landfill-free plants, most of them oversees, and said it will propel 80 more into that category in the next 28 months.
GM, while one of the most aggressive in pursuit of waste-free manufacturing, isn't alone in the auto world. Most automakers are aiming for landfill-free status for their factories and Subaru of America's Indiana plant earlier this year became the first U.S. auto assembly facility to gain that distinction.
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Scrap metal at GM's transmission plant in Warren, Mich., is carried to recycling bins on huge conveyor belt.
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In addition to the environmental value of keeping scrap metals, oils and other fluids, rubber, plastic, composites and the myriad other things that are left over form the auto-making process out of the world's trash heaps, there are financial benefits to be had in making a plant self-sufficient, refuse-wise.
Stuff that used to go to the dump must by recycled - either for reuse in its original form or to be turned into something else.
And recycling typically saves companies money because they've already paid for the raw materials when they are using waste from their manufacturing processes.
GM, for example, already is earning almost $1 billion in annual revenue from selling recycled metal from its factories. The company also expects to generate close to $16 million a year in North America alone from the sale of things such as recycled oil, wood and plastic.
Commenting on the environmental aspects of the program, GM manufacturing chief Gary Cowger said the company wants to "be a leader in finding solutions to the environmental issues facing our world."
The company says that more than 96 percent of waste materials are recycled or reused and the rest is converted to energy at waste-to-energy facilities in its existing landfill-free plants. Eliminating waste to this degree is a GM manufacturing priority.
More than 3 million tons of waste materials will be recycled or reused by GM plants worldwide this year, said Cowger, whose official title is group vice president of global manufacturing and labor.
The automaker's waste elimination will reduce its global carbon dioxide emissions by 3.65 million metric tons this year, in addition to the unspecified CO2 reduction from cutting down on energy consumption by using recycled material.
John O'Dell, Senior Editor
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Photo by Jeffrey Sauger, courtesy of General Motors Corp.
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- John O'Dell September 5, 2008, 4:47 PM
- Categories:
- General Motors, Recycling
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- General Motors
, Landfill-Free Manufacturing, Recycling, Waste-free Manufacturing
August 20, 2008
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Then: "Fill 'er up with premium."
Now: "Let's see. I've got $50, so guess I'll get 12 gallons of regular unleaded."
Someday: "Gimme 10 gallons of that sewage sludge distillate please."
Sounds yucky, but sewage sludge and garbage and plant waste that used to go to the dumps may someday be part of the nation's transportation fuels supply.
A two-year-old California startup,
Byogy Renewables Inc.
, said today that it has licensed a process developed by researchers at Texas A&M University that turns waste into high octane gasoline.
Production of the alternative fuel could begin within two years (
could
being the operative wiggle word), said Daniel Rudnick, chief executive of the Bakersfield-based company.
The beauty of the biofuel Byogy hopes to produce is that it doesn't need to be blended with other fuels, he said.
And it can be shipped through existing gasoline pipelines and pumped from existing gasoline pumps, unlike biodiesel or alcohol fuels such as ethanol that are corrosive and need to be blended and, in some cases require a separate delivery and pumping infrastructure.
"This technology is important because it addresses many issues -- eliminating waste, producing economical fuel quickly and being friendly to our environment," said Kenneth Hall, associate director of the
Texas Engineering Experiment Station
at Texas A&M University, which developed the waste conversion process.
"Furthermore, this technology is ready to be commercialized now and does not require any new scientific or technological breakthroughs to become a reality," Hall said in an interview with Greenwire, a subscription-only environmental news service.
Byogy uses a multi-step process that begins with fermenting the waste and then treating it hith heat and chemicals to produce intermediate materials that are subjected to heat and pressure to produce 95-octane gasoline, Rudnick said in an interview with
Green Car Advisor.
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- John O'Dell August 20, 2008, 7:18 AM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Biofuels, Fuels & Technologies, Recycling
- Technorati Tags:
- Alternative Fuel
, Bio Fuel, Biofuel, Byogy, Texas A&M
August 7, 2008
Long the bane of lawn owners everywhere, the sunny-faced dandelion could revolutionize the rubber industry.
Scientists from Ohio State University and the Ohio BioProducts Innovation Center recently received a $3 million grant to design and build a processing plant that would turn sticky white dandelion root sap into quality rubber, according to a Discovery News article published this week.
"We still haven't been able to find an artificial substitute for natural rubber," said William Ravlin, a researcher involved in the project. "We're still harvesting [rubber] the same way they did 1,000 years ago -- by cutting into the tree and letting the sap drip into containers. It's not a very efficient system."
Efficiency, the Ohio scientists say, would be Midwestern farmers in air-conditioned tractors harvesting acres of dandelions with the same machines used to pull tulip bulbs.
Ten to 20 percent of the plant's carrot-like root is rubber-ready. "And that's without modifying them with biotechnology or breeding," Ravlin told Discovery News.
Researchers expect that within a few years the processing plant in Ohio could produce about 20 million tons of rubber annually.
Synthetic rubber doesn't perform as well as natural rubber. Car tires can contain as little as 10 percent natural rubber, but the more demanding the job, the more natural rubber is needed: Airplane tires are 100 percent natural rubber.
Some of the dandelion rubber will eventually go to Bridgestone, a leading tire manufacturer.
"I think this has some real potential," Bridgestone's Jason Poulton told Discovery News.
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- Scott Doggett August 7, 2008, 3:35 PM
- Categories:
- Biofuels, Fuel Economy, Recycling, Tires
- Technorati Tags:
- Bridgestone
, Dandelions, Environment, Recycle, Rubber
June 9, 2008
Sanitation facility will extract hydrogen from methane gas in sewage tanks.Some Southern California drivers may be able to tool around in "poop-powered" vehicles as early as next year, according to
a Bloomberg report.The motorists would have to be among those driving the limited number of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that automakers including General Motors Corp. and Honda Motor Co. are beginning to make available.
Those who've got one will be able to fill up at a sewage treatment facility run by the Orange County Sanitation District, which plans to turn the inflow of excrement and other waste into hydrogen for electric vehicles that run on fuel-cell systems.
"Poop is actually a relatively minor portion of the material coming down the pipes,'' said Ed Torres, the district's director of technical services. "It's mostly food wastes and other organic materials washed down the drain, and all the paper that's flushed down the toilet."
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- John O'Dell June 9, 2008, 3:01 AM
- Categories:
- Alternative Fuels, Biofuels, Fuel Cell, General Motors, Honda, Hydrogen, Plug-ins and Electric, Recycling
June 3, 2008
By Robert E. Calem, Contributor
Automakers may be touting gee-whiz technologies to power their eco-friendly cars of the future, but respectful treatment of that old clunker that's in your garage today when its useful life is over could be equally helpful in the overall effort to save the environment.
There's lots of metal and plastic there and, as it does for soda bottles and newspapers, recycling can mean redemption for even the biggest gas guzzler.
According to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA) – a Fairfax, Virginia, based group comprising nearly 3,000 automotive recycling businesses worldwide – automobiles are the most recycled consumer product on the globe.
In the U.S. alone, auto recycling yields enough steel to produce almost 13 million new cars annually. It's the 16th largest industry in the U.S., generating about $10 billion annually and employing approximately 100,000 people.
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- John O'Dell June 3, 2008, 3:04 AM
- Categories:
- Recycling
A couple of months ago we reported on Ford Motor Co.'s "bio-babes," the five highly educated female scientists who comprise the automaker's Biomaterials and Plastics Research team. 
