Every cloud has a silver lining – and General Motors is determined to get something good out of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill disaster.
It has developed a method to convert around 100miles of the oil-laden plastic boom material used to soak up oil from the BP spill into parts for the Chevrolet Volt.
The booms are made from polypropylene material and are almost entirely recyclable once waste oil and water are removed. Recycling them will result in around 100,000lbs of plastic resin for the vehicle components and will eliminate an equal amount of waste that would otherwise have been sent to landfills. It is hoped they will provide enough plastic hood parts to cover the first year of production for the vehicle.
The parts themselves will be made from 25 per cent boom material and 25 per cent recycled tyres with the remainder coming from a mixture of post-consumer recycled plastics and other polymers.
To achieve the recycling, GM first worked with Heritage Environmental to collect the material; then with Mobile Fluid Recovery which used large centrifuges to spin the booms dry and removed all the absorbed oil and water. Lucent Polymers then manipulated the materials into the physical state necessary for production while GDC Inc used its Enduraprene material process to combine the resin with other plastic compounds to produce the components.
