Photos by Michael Bettencourt and courtesy Ford

The electrification of mainstream vehicles is coming to Ford Motor Company, certainly before fuel cells, but right now the company is focused on refining the internal combustion engine and ‘lightweighting,’ as on their new for 2015 F-150, said one of Ford’s top sustainability executives recently.

That’s a slight variation on the ‘power of choice’ green theme they’ve espoused over the last couple of years, which highlighted a stepladder of efficient internal combustion (EcoBoost) engines, then increasing levels of electrification, from hybrid to plug-in hybrid on up to fully eco-righteous pure electric vehicle. But the costs of all this electrification are still higher than many consumers want to accept, Ford officials argued, during a wide-ranging tour of Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan research facilities and its Rouge truck plant. The tour highlighted some of the firm’s sustainability measures, all purposefully timed around Earth Day.

The focus on Ford’s EcoBoost engines as well as its lightweighting pickup initiatives came from an overall corporate goal back in 2006 to reduce carbon emissions, said Carrie Majeskie, Ford’s associate director of global sustainability integration. “The goal was to achieve (a new vehicle fleet average of) 54.5 mpg (4.3 L/100 km) by 2030,” she said. That plan was likely accelerated by the enactment of tougher fuel economy mandates in the U.S. that will require an NHTSA overall average of 54.5 mpg by model year 2025 vehicles.

This certainly does not mean we’ll all be forced into subcompact Mitsubishi Mirage-type three-cylinder econoboxes, thankfully, in 10 years. Those mileage requirements are flexible enough that many industry observers have predicted that the actual EPA sticker average for the new vehicle fleet will be closer to 40 mpg in 2025. Using the Canadian government’s similar five-cycle fuel efficiency measures introduced last fall, this new standard will lead to a fleet average closer to a 5.9 L/100 km.

Still, as anti-green as it sounds, Ford freely admits most of its profits come from large and relatively thirsty pickups and SUVs. But it’s in those high-volume trucks that it sees the most opportunities to reduce emissions in the short term, says Majeskie.

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“The aluminum F-150 came out of our 2006 initiative, so we found the best way to get there (lower emissions and higher fuel economy) was through lighter weight, which also allows you to decrease the size of the powertrain.” With the new F-150 weighing anywhere from 275 to 315 kg less than before, every engine option instantly became more fuel efficient and more responsive, which is key in offering consumers a downsized 2.7L EcoBoost V6 option, a displacement that looks more like a mid-size sedan than full-size truck option. “We’ll see more aluminum going forward, maybe not to this extent, but it is coming.”

Recycled fabrics another sustainable target

It’s easy to view these fuel efficiency gains as more of a mandated change than progressive corporate policy. Governments around the world are leading Ford and all other global automakers to reduce their tailpipe emissions and therefore (fossil) fuel consumption. But Ford is also making advancements in using recycled materials inside their vehicles, a move that received a lot of resistance from suppliers, said Carol Kordich, Ford’s global sustainable fabric strategy manager.

“When we developed a green strategy for our hybrids and electrics, and said we’re going to require 100 percent recycled materials, we had the same type of restraints as the architectural business,” where Kordich first helped develop sustainable materials for a large architectural firm in the 1980s and ‘90s. “They looked at us and said, ‘Umm, we don’t have that,’ and they weren’t very interested in producing something new for us.”

Ford’s first hybrid was the Escape Hybrid that came out in 2005, and by 2009, Ford required all seat materials in all their vehicles to have a minimum of 25 percent recycled content. “So when our suppliers realized how serious we were about these fabrics, they began to be serious about offering different choices,” said Kordich.

Those efforts culminated in the interior of the Focus EV, Ford’s first zero emissions, all-electric vehicle sold to the public. “We wanted to do something very special,” she said. “So it uses Repreve yarns (throughout), which are 100 percent recycled yarns that use post-industrial (fibre waste) and post-consumer (from plastic bottles) [material].” Ford estimates that about 22 half-litre-sized clear plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) are used in the seat fabric inside each Focus Electric. The supplier Unifi that produces this fully recycled Repreve blend then allows the car’s buyers to choose from one of several environmental funds or charities they’d like to support, and the company then donates one percent of its Focus EV Repreve sales in the proportional choosing of these buyers.

Perhaps more critically on a volume basis, this Repreve material is also used on the F-150, and on four other Ford vehicle lines globally, though to a lower extent. Ford is the only automaker to use the unique Repreve material, which Ford estimates will divert more than five million plastic bottles from landfills in 2015.

Solar, chargers, and bio-materials

Our tour of Ford’s sustainability measures in and around Dearborn included a new solar parking structure that is set to open at Ford’s world headquarters at the end of May, which will cover 360 employee parking spots with a solar canopy that will produce 1.13 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy per year, or enough to power 158 average-sized homes all year long. The structure will also offer 28 Level 2 charging stations to encourage employee plug-in hybrid and EV use, though the chargers won’t be made available for the public to use, unfortunately.

The facility will be the largest solar array in Michigan, and the second largest solar carport in the Midwest, says Ford.

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.

Mielewski said there are continuous studies into how previously discarded industrial waste can be used for various production materials. Ford has started working with Heinz to use the thousands of pounds of tomato stems they’d use every week in ketchup production, which Heinz would formerly burn or send to landfills. Ford has also studied the use of shredded U.S. currency, grass/yard/tree fibres (cellulosic waste), as well as rice hulls, cigarette filters, and a joint project with Coca-Cola to use plant-based products to produce their green-capped bottles. These bottles are now about 30 percent plant based, she said, with the firms working towards 100 percent.

Even huge pickup truck plants can be green

From there, we ended up on a tour of Ford’s Rouge factory, which now employs 6,800 people to produce 380,000 pickups per year, or about one truck every minute of every day. At this plant’s height, it employed over 100,000 people in the early days of mass production, where company founder Henry Ford envisioned and created the largest vertically integrated manufacturing operation in the world.

With a plant this size, fixing the roof in 1999 was a major corporate undertaking. That’s when the process started to what eventually became a huge 10.4 acre living roof, with 15 carefully selected plants (“sedums” officially) grown there to help insulate the Dearborn truck plant underneath, reducing heating and cooling costs, as well as reducing maintenance and weather-related roof costs.

It is the largest living roof in North America, and once recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest living roof in the world. It has since lost that title, but is still the largest free-standing industrial living roof in the world, said Cynthia Jones, the general manager of the plant’s tour program.

These efforts are not something that shows up in glossy Ford truck brochures, or touted in commercials or on websites. Yes, there’s certainly a financial benefit of the company to many of these programs, if not all of them. But there’s also plenty of green innovation going on behind the scenes, even on some of Ford’s thirstiest but most popular vehicles.

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