iOS app Android app More  Andrea Chalupa  Andrea Chalupa
Posted: January 15, 2010 02:51 PM  The future of Ford's cars:
biodegradable?  What's Your Reaction:  Imagine fertilizing your
garden with car parts. That's the dream of Debbie Mielewski and
her team of bio-engineers at the Ford Research and Innovation
Center in Dearborn, Mich.  I was invited to check out how
Mielewski's Plastics Research Group is engineering an earth-
friendlier plastic, at a time when crisis-levels are choking the
Pacific Ocean.  The average car has about 300 pounds of plastic
in it. That plastic is petroleum based. And if you've heard of
the Great Garbage Patch -- a plastic soup the size of Texas
floating in the Pacific Ocean -- you know that plastic is an
enemy of the earth.  But it's practically everywhere and needed,
for now, in the cars we drive. If we have to wean our cars off
of oil, we also need to include weaning the car-parts off of it
too.  "My dream is to have compostable plastics on vehicles.
Instead of going to a landfill