Always the innovator in creating car parts out of plants that arent trees, Ford Motor Company plans to burnish its green cred with a new building material: a composite created partly from dried coffee bean husks.

Following the automakers soybean experiments of the early 1940s, Ford adopted soybean-based foam for its seat cushions back in 2008. Now, coffee chaff will help add strength and lower energy use for the manufacture of headlight housings and other components. Its supplier partner on this project? McDonalds.

The companies found that chaff can be converted into a durable material to reinforce certain vehicle parts. By heating the chaff to high temperatures under low oxygen, mixing it with plastic and other additives and turning it into pellets, the material can be formed into various shapes, the automaker said in a statement Wednesday.

The process of roasting coffee separates the skin from the bean, after which it is discarded. Millions of pounds of the stuff then sits around, being of no use to anyone. McDonalds which brews a far better cup of coffee than Tim Hortons, by the way, and how about that sausage-and-egg McMuffin? Damn! now expects to funnel much of its coffee waste to Ford.

Like McDonalds, Ford is committed to minimizing waste and were always looking for innovative ways to further that goal, said Ian Olson, Mickey Ds senior director of global sustainability. By finding a way to use coffee chaff as a resource, we are elevating how companies together can increase participation in the closed-loop economy.

Already, such headlamp housings are going into the doomed Lincoln Continental, but their use will proliferate throughout the brand. Fords other partners on this effort are Varroc Lighting Systems, which supplies the headlamps, and Competitive Green Technologies, which processes the coffee chaff.

[Image: Ford]

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