Once inside Ford’s nearby Research Innovation Centre, it was time to look at future products – that’s future bio products, not future vehicles, such as materials used to make seat foam that traditionally use oil-based products. Debbie Mielewski is a bio materials enthusiast, though her official title is senior technical materials and manufacturing leader, where she oversees the testing, procuring and sourcing of a wide variety of ingredients that are typically waste products of other industrial processes, but can be used for a huge range of mostly unseen materials and parts.

“Because we produce globally, we try to use whatever material is plentiful in those areas,” she said, including at Ford’s Oakville plant, where wheat straw waste from local farms is repurposed to be used in the air cleaner tube for vehicles coming out of the Oakville facility. “We’re working with the Canadian Research Centre to work with wheat straw, as much of it is burned in landfills.”

That Oakville facility achieved zero-waste-to-landfill status in 2014, giving all of Ford’s Canadian manufacturing facilities this status. That’s a nice feather in Oakville’s cap, as it’s Ford’s first assembly facility in North America to reach zero operational waste to landfill, at the Ontario plant that produces the Edge, Flex, Lincoln MKX and MKT. It’s all part of a global push to decrease landfill waste by 40 percent from 2011 levels, which had already been reduced by 40 percent in the five years between then and 2007.

Back in Dearborn, Mielewski shows us what other types of waste materials are being used in vehicles now, such as cotton from blue jeans used as interior padding, and soy bean-based foams that can still compete with oil-based foams on cost and quality levels, even with relatively low oil prices. Right now, there are about 31,000 soy beans used to make the seat foam in a Ford Escape, though at the beginning, Ford’s suppliers continually asked why there were doing this, she said.

“Bill Ford was our only supporter back then,” when they started the five-year process, said Mielewski, which has to meet the same quality and cost levels as the oil-based materials to be adopted. “But then oil spiked to $160 a barrel, so that helped.”

The tinkering continues now, with a demonstration of how quickly such bio-foam expands using a large popcorn bucket, where they test its expandability, thickness and other parameters, as well as dissect it afterwards to check whether there are any voids in it.

Just because it’s better for the environment, doesn’t mean it receives special treatment on the cost, quality or ease of use parameters that all Ford’s materials have to meet.

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