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Ford Shows Off Recyclable Car
Opspin writes "MBDC (who wrote the book Cradle to Cradle) write in their
January Newsletter about a Ford Concept Car that includes Bluetooth technology as well as Cradle-to-Cradle design strategies. Read the MBDC press release, and the Ford Motor Company press release."
I'd like to have the opportunity to throw away a Ford Focus. Sure it probably has all of the proper bullet points, but there are lots of very nice cars out there with the right price/feature ratio that actually have a _soul_!
I must say that it's a great concept, but my first impression is that the thing is really ugly. I wonder how many people rank the look of their vehicle in the list of priorities for buying. If they do, will the look of this one negatively affect its sales?
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Photos in Google's cache can be found here.
In all honesty, how many people do you think actually recycle? Fine, a new disposable environmentally friendly car is developed. But, last I checked, most recyclable items still ended up in trash and ultimately in land fills. I can't imagine what would happen if you could throw away a car that often
It doesn't help that the President now wants to provide tax incentives for certain types of SUV owners. Face it, beneath the green rhetoric, the US is a society that lives on pig iron and fossil fuels.
From the article:
- Corn-based roof canvas
- Bio-materials, including soy-based foam and tailgate, sunflower seed-based oil, corn tire filler
if you run out of other uses for it, you can eat it too!
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
They are quite progressive about this subject. Here is a research paper on the German law.
For decades the automobile has been the most recycled consumer product. First a discarded automobile is stripped of its vauable parts. Ever attend a 'all-you-can-carry' day at an automotive salvage yard? A huge crowd of people disassembling autos for the parts they need. Doors, hoods, dashboards, engines, alternators, seats, anything....
Also note, that the majority of stolen cars are stolen for their parts.
After striping, depending on the car and its arrival condition it can be anything from a stripped shell to pretty much intact. At this point the car is crushed.
The crushed car is then put through a shredder, then through various processes the metals are separated and depending how advanced the facility, the plastics and other materials.
BTW, under consideration in europe for auto recycling has beena dismantling approach. Where the automaker takes the car back and actually diassembles it, rather than using a crusher and shreadder.
Even if one is displeased with the actual amount of automotive recycling, the fact remains, it is higher than other consumer products.
Seems that a car like this should be more geared twords business or people who buy on a leese. For the general buyer, a throw away car will not be all that hot of an idea. Having monthly payments on a limited income is what you try to avoid. While this idea really isnt new, im suprised that Ford is one of the first to actually come out and say "Hey, this car wont last x yrs and its not made to." One other thing, how enviromently friendly is a car like this anyway? Ya, it cuts down on emitions and fuel consumption but havning an entire car get retired and destroyed after a short period of time isnt all that great. The car will still have to be gutted, crushed, recycled back to workable material, all this generating waste and other nice byproducts. Looks like we might just be creating the same amout of toxins and waste just in another area.
Don't forget that Ford really sucks.
Chris
It's about time they started making the things from carbon fibre (or even glass fibre), which is easily repaired, lightweight (therefore more fuel efficient), and totally immune to corrosion. The attitude that a car is a disposable commodity, to be tossed in the trash every couple of years is daft. I would rather see manufacturers offering upgrades to existing vehicle as an alternative.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
This is a concept intended as "proof of concept", and not for production.
If it were intended for production, there would be a lot more refinement of processes, materials, and even design elements involved, and a lot more details fothcoming about such elements. If it were intended for production, there would at least be focus groups involved in such things as its marketability in its current form (such as it is). Not to mention lobbying for the infrastructure necessary to get a car like this produced and feasably useable (hydrogen-refill stations, for one).
Instead, this seeks to prove that something, in theory, COULD be done. Recyclable body panels are nothing new (Ford had an aluminum concept several years ago, and the new Jaguar X-type owes its many production delays toward the use of aluminum). Even subassemblies can be salvaged. And Hydrogen fuel cells have been in limited use and testing for over a decade.
What's interesting about this, is the use of new materials for fluids (arguably the most cancerous of all automotive components) and plastics. I'm not a chemist, but the testing of new corn and soy-based polymers for everything from interior materials to fluids is fascinating to me. At the very best, if pursued such processes could finally wean the US (and manufacturing in other sectors outside of the auto industry) off petroleum-based plastics and fluids, which would be a gigantic leap forward for industry, without question.
The "modular interior/ exterior" BS is all just marketing of design concepts. That's there to show that designs can lead themselves toward being more eco-friendly in a subtler fashion. Going back to the salvage industry: It's a lot easier to find salvage parts from platform-sharing cars Cougar/Thunderbird/MarkVII, Cavalier/Sunfire, Chrysler K-car, etc etc etc) than it is for one-offs. This concept I think seeks to carry over that mentality on a larger scale, tho with the public's demand for unique vehicles I doubt we'll ever see swappable parts on a grand scale.
It will be years if not decades before something like this can be driven off the lot, but it's good to know that the ideas are being tested. This concept should be good for new materials processing if nothing more. The only trick will be to keep Ford and other companies pursuing this, as opposed to saying "Great, we know it's possible, now go mothball that POS in a barn somewhere and let's forget it ever saw the light of day".
~~~
"The slave thinks he is released from bondage, only to find a stronger set of chains" - NIN
Excellent points all around. Your thinking argues for an entirely different strategy.
You want true automotive recycling? Pursue greater modularity and standard across automakers. Decrease black-boxiness of parts (make them mechanic repairable as they once were).
Of course these goals, as always, are probably at cross purposes with others.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
...about car manufacturers who boast about their cars being easily recycled instead of their cars being engineered to last a lifetime?
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
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Because of the European take-back regulations, BMW and other automakers have been designing their cars to be taken apart and recycled faster and easier for several years now.
Back in one of my environmental engineering classes, we saw a film on one of these take-back plants. It took a couple people just an hour or so to strip a BMW from all its recyclable parts, including stuff like draining (and saving) the fluids, pulling off all plastic parts, etc.
And BMW is always watching and feeding back into the design process. They've reduced the types of plastics used to have less bins and sorting involved. They've reduced the use of gluing, welding, and riveting of parts on and replaced with mechnical fasteners (screws, bolts), making it easier to take apart. Instead of a taillight assy having two types of plastic (lens, backshell) being glued or rivetted together, now its one type that may snap together.
German car fetishists may voice concern that stuff like this may reduce the quality or performance of their favorite vehicles, but to me that means they aren't as purist as they claim, they don't trust the same engineers that designed their favorite cars in the first place.
He did not stutter, the concept is in fact called Cradle to Cradle. It's a concept presented in a book by the MDBC founders called, Cradle to Cradle [slashdot], in which they claim, rather reasonably, that you're not -really- recycling unless the product you produce is of equal or greater material quality than the product you started with.
If you take petroleum, and make soda bottles, and then you take soda bottles and make them into seat cushions and polyfill for coats, blankets, etc, you've recycled the material only once, but you can't recycle polyfill into anything useful, so it goes into the landfill when you're done with it.
You've recycled the material once, doubling its lifetime. In a perfect world, you're reducing the waste stream by only half, by making every coat from recycled material, and new bottle with new material. Cradle to Cradle says, let's make that soda bottle out of a plastic that can be broken down and made back into feedstock for making soda bottles, and coats out of material that can be made out of coats. In other words, returning it to the Cradle. Assuming some wear and tear on the materials, you still could expect to recycle more than 95% of the bottle back into another bottle. Now, in a perfect world, 19 of every 20 bottles is made from recycled material, ditto for coats.
Cradle to Grave just means someone is responsible for the eulogy, which will eventually be ours if we don't stop dumping high-grade materials into holes in the ground.
Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.
The Hindenburg fire was not a hydrogen fire.
DETROIT - General Motors Corp. dealers sold 309,263 new cars and trucks in November in the United States, down 18 percent versus November 2001. GM's overall truck sales (171,862) were down 26 percent; car sales (137,401) were down 6 percent.
So they brought in all sorts of incentives (0.9 percent financing, rebates, etc) to pump up their year-to-year sales figures.
Experience shows that it takes about 5 years for the marketplace to "correct" from abberations introduced by such marketing schemes.
Just look at their financials (quarter ending september 30th 2002) Quote from yahoo financials
Gross profit of almost $13 billion, and a loss of almost a billion bucks *cough*after expenses*.cough*
It wasn't a sustainable business model in the '70s, it didn't work for the dot-bombs in the '90s, and we're going to see SUV sales go through the floor when SUVs are required to meet the same standards (safety, fuel economy, etc) as other passenger vehicles.
So who's going to benefit? Not the big three, who can't see past the latest quarter. My money is on Toyota.
Better yet, it might be wise to bring back the days when cars were built almost entirely out of steel, not out of plastic and sheet metal like they are today. Those old cars could withstand collisions with just about anything short of a tractor/trailer (lorry for you Brits), and sometimes even then. You could actually walk away from a 20mph crash, instead of having to call for an ambulance.
Sorry, but that's a common fallacy. See, when you have a collision between two objects, the kinetic energy has to be dissipated somewhere. In older cars, the body/chassis of the car didn't deform, which meant that the kinetic energy was (in many cases) transferred to the people inside. Modern cars crumple on impact so the people inside don't. Hence, if you were in a car from 1960, the car would have a dent while the people would be gravely injured, while the same accident in a 2000 -model car would probably total the car, but the occupants could walk away.
If you can make a new car as crash-resistant as an old one, without using steel, that'll be great. If not... well, I care more about my safety than I do about miles per gallon. I agree that most people don't need gas guzzlers such as SUV's, but the sacrifice of auto safety on the altar of the environment has been going on for way too long.
SUVs are not safer for the driver/occupants, and significantly more dangerous for other people on the road. Hence, each large SUV bought is a net decrease in total road safety, as well as fuel economy. If everyone drove Japanese/European passenger sedans, the roads would be significantly safer than they are now, since those cars routinely score the highest on IIHTS/NHTSA crash tests and don't endanger other drivers/passengers.