Ford has been recycling plastic bottles to produce carpets for its EcoSport crossover.
The SUV’s carpets are said to be made of 470 single-use plastic drinks bottles and have since its 2012 launch. In that time, the model has provided a new lease of life to over 650 million 500ml containers.
To create fabrics from the bottles, the bottles and their caps are first shredded into small flakes. These flakes are then heated to 260 degrees Celsius and melted down to be formed into fibres said to be the width of a single human hair.
These fibres are then spun into yarn by twisting multiple fibres together, with the resulting material woven into carpets before being deployed in the crossover. Ford first began this type of reuse in the Mondeo over 20 years ago, and it claims to now recycle 1.2 billion bottles annually to reuse in its cars.
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Tony Weatherhead, materials engineer at Ford, said: “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.”
