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Ford is making car parts from what?

Answer: Coffee.

Ford
Shutterstock
Ford has turned to an intersting new matierial in an attempt to cut back on the use of plastics in car parts: coffee chaff. This is the papery stuff that comes off of coffee beans during roasting, and its notoriously annoying stuff for coffee roasters to have to deal with. There’s always a lot of it that has to be rounded up and thrown away.

So McDonald’s has decided that rather than sending all that chaff to the incinerator (or whatever they have to do to properly dispose of it), they’re just going to ship it off to Ford instead. From there, the automaker will heat it up and mix it with plastics to form pellets that can be used to make car parts. These pieces are much more lightweight than those made entirely of plastic and require a lot less energy to make. 

The first thing that Ford is producing with this new material is headlight covers, but the company sees potential to expand to many other parts going forward. “The headlamps are just a start. We're already testing the properties in several other underhood and storage applications, with the goal of quickly expanding to a wide variety of additional Ford and Lincoln parts in the coming years,” said Debbie Mielewski, Ford senior technical leader, sustainability and emerging materials research team.