GM uses oil boom to produce parts for the Chevy Volt

General Motors has found a way to give use to the oil-soaked plastic boom material that is being used to soak up oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The American Group is using it to produce parts for its Chevrolet Volt.

In fact General Motors will be converting an estimated 100 miles of the material retrieved from the Alabama and Louisiana coasts, which is expected to generate enough plastic under hood parts to supply the first year production of the extended-range electric vehicle.

“Creative recycling is one extension of GM’s overall strategy to reduce its environmental impact,” said Mike Robinson, GM vice president of Environment, Energy and Safety policy.  “We reuse and recycle material by-products at our 76 landfill-free facilities every day. This is a good example of using this expertise and applying it to a greater magnitude.”

Thanks to the recycling of booms, GM will produce more than 100,000 pounds of plastic resin for the vehicle components. By doing so, the Group will be preventing the elimination of this waste by incineration, or by sending it to landfills.

In order to carry this recycling process GM worked with several partners. Heritage Environmental was responsible for collecting boom material along the Louisiana coast. Mobile Fluid Recovery then used a high-speed drum that spun the booms until dry and eliminated all the absorbed oil and wastewater. Then it was the time for Lucent Polymers to use its process to manipulate the material into the physical state necessary for plastic die-mold production. Finally the tier-one supplier, GDC Inc., used its patented EndurapreneTM material process to combine the resin with other plastic compounds to produce the components.

“This was purely a matter of helping out,” said John Bradburn, manager of GM’s waste-reduction efforts. “If sent to a landfill, these materials would have taken hundreds of years to begin to break down, and we didn’t want to see the spill further impact the environment. We knew we could identify a beneficial reuse of this material given our experience.”

The works on the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico are expected to continue for two more months. GM thinks that the materials will also be used in the production of components for other models of the company.