General Motors (NYSE: GM) has intercepted 100 miles of used oil control booms from the BP Gulf of Mexico mega oil spill, (which I wrote about here, here, here, and here) preventing them from going into landfills. Instead, TheDetroitBureau.com reports that oil-soaked booms are transformed into plastic parts for the Chevy Volt.

Mike Robinson, GM vice president of Environment, Energy and Safety policy explained to TheDetroitBureau that the automaker has been able to recycle the polypropylene plastics used in the oil booms set out to contain and capture the oil spilled by a runaway British Petroleum (BP) well. GM and its suppliers are turning the recycled material into plastic parts used in the Volt, such as a shroud for the radiator according to GM. “Creative recycling is one extension of GM’s overall strategy to reduce its environmental impact,” Mr. Robinson said, the Detroit-based automaker already finds ways to cut landfilling at 76 of its facilities. The recycling of Gulf oil booms, he added, “is a good example of using this expertise and applying it to a greater magnitude.”

In the article, Chris Miller vice president of sales and market for GDC Inc. says the old booms are mixed with other recycled material, including used tires, and processed to yield a plastic resin which can be shaped into a variety of plastic parts. “The recycled resin is a lot less expensive than virgin resin,” he said. In fact, GM’s Robinson described the overall process as “cost-neutral,” meaning the final parts and components cost the same as those produced by more conventional processes.

“Recycling the booms will result in the production of more than 100,000 pounds of plastic resin for the vehicle components,” said John Bradburn, manager of GM’s waste-reduction efforts, eliminating an equal amount of waste that would otherwise have been incinerated or sent to landfills. “This was purely a matter of helping out,”  Mr. Bradburn told TheDetroitBureau. “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” Mr. Bradburn added.

GM’s Bradburn says the project demonstrates the booms, which are also widely used around construction projects and limited spills, don’t have to be buried or burned but can be recycled. He also noted it should encourage the manufacturers of the booms to make them easier to recycle.

TheDetroitBureau says besides GDC, GM worked with several partners throughout the recovery and development processes. Heritage Environmental managed the collection of boom materials along the Louisiana coast. Mobile Fluid Recovery stepped in next, using a massive high-speed drum that spun the booms until dry and eliminated all the absorbed oil and wastewater. Lucent Polymers used its process to then manipulate the material into the physical state necessary for plastic die-mold production.

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Hmm- something must be changing at GM, when I worked at the GM tech center in the 1990s there were not many green efforts. Even if this is a marketing ploy to beef up the Volt’s green-cred’s, it is a good step. Let’s hope they keep up the imaginative thinking.

Related articles

• Oil from BP Gulf spill still fresh: study (marketwatch.com)
• BP blamed over Gulf spill safety (bbc.co.uk)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.