Ford and McDonald's have found a way to use your morning cup of joe to help build cars.
Ford Motor Company ($F) and McDonald's ($MCD) announced on Wednesday a collaboration involving coffee beans to create a product used to reinforce vehicle parts.
Debbie Mielewski, senior technical leader of the sustainability and emerging materials research team at Ford, explained the process to Cheddar.
While the beans roast, they shed skin which becomes "coffee chaff." The chaff is then sent to a Ford materials supplier, who "does a little chemistry on it," and figures out how to compound it into plastic. Once in the plastic, Ford can mold parts out of it.
Ford is planning to launch the process in headlamp housings since the material turns out to be more durable and has higher heat performance, according to Mielewski. But sustainability plays a major role in the product's innovation.
"It's 20 percent coffee chaff, but the magic is it's replacing 40 percent of a mineral that we had to mine from the Earth," Mielewski said. "And so it's lighter weight, and better for the environment. It's something above ground, so we don't have to ruin the planet by mining."
Sustainable initiatives aren't new to Ford. Mielewski said soy-based foam is in every Ford vehicle build in North America. She added there are 12 other sustainable materials used in production.
Inspiration for the new coffee chaff method came from the lab itself. Mielewski said everybody there was drinking lots of coffee, and they thought there had to be a useful side or waste product from the drink.
Mielewski said McDonald's makes a billion cups of coffee per year, with 2.5 million in the United States alone. She said the fast-food giant was "immediately on board" when Ford began talks.
"This one is such a win-win all the way around the table," Mielewski said. "It actually takes 25 percent less energy to mold these parts now, because we can mold at a lower temperature in our processes. So everywhere you look, you don't have to mine. You don't have to grind the talc. The coffee chaff is right in front of us. It makes so much sense to partner with McDonald's to do this."
The product debuts this month on the Lincoln Continental, with plans to move into other programs in the future.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
