The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has many different companies trying to find ways to help the cleanup. Detroit MI Automaker General Motors has created a method to recycle BP’s plastic oil booms.
Detroit MI residents have no doubt heard about the oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig. It has been months, and the cleanup is still going strong.
Large companies like General Motors are trying to find ways they can help the damaged environment. GM’s solution was to recycle about 100 miles of plastic booms being used by BP to clean up the spill and to turn them into usable parts for the new Chevrolet Volt.
Chevrolet Volt MI owners and all others who enjoy the Volt know the extended-range electric car is already helping the environment through its fuel-efficient design. The first 25 – 50 miles is purely on its 16-kWh lithium-ion battery while the last 300 is gas-powered on only one tank of gas. With General Motors’ recycle plan to help with the oil spill, the Chevrolet Volt will help serve the environment even better as it uses recycled parts.
General Motors decided to take the oil-soaked plastic booms off the coast of Alabama and Louisiana and create more than 100,000 pounds of plastic resin that is being used to create parts which deflect air around the Volt’s radiator.
“This was purely a matter of helping out,” said John Bradburn, manager of GM’s waste-reduction efforts, in a press release. “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 parts being made by Detroit MI automaker GM are a combined 25 percent boom material and 25 percent recycled tires from GM’s Milford Proving Ground vehicle test facility. The remaining 50 percent is a mixture of post-consumer plastic and other polymers that have been recycled.
General Motors has stated the recycling project will make enough plastic parts to supply the first year of production of the Chevrolet Volt.
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