Ford system recycles 20 million pounds of aluminum monthly

Ford’s state-of-the-art recycling system. Image by Ford via AFP Relaxnews

What American multinational automaker Ford is doing is pretty straightforward in some respects.

The excess aluminum left behind after body panels are stamped out of sheets of the high-strength military-grade, lightweight metal is recycled to make new sheets for more body panels to be stamped out of.

The closed-loop recycling system now being employed at the Kentucky Truck and Buffalo Stamping facilities is a large, automated vacuum system with in excess of two miles of tubes crisscrossing the plants.

The scrap material left behind after stamping is shredded into small pieces of around the size of a dollar bill. These are then sucked into the recycling system and sent in seconds, using computer-controlled gates, to a multi-ton pile in the back of a truck.

The system is aware which of the four different grades of alloy is being stamped at any one time, and therefore sends the scrap to the appropriate one of four waiting trucks to be taken for recycling.

Using high-strength military-grade in production of its F-Series pickup trucks provides best-in-class capabilities and efficiency, which already leads to improved sustainability.

Recycling the scrap aluminum further adds to the company’s sustainability as recycling it uses one-tenth of the energy it takes to produce new aluminum.

Overall, the amount of aluminum recycled is enough to build as many as 51 commercial jetliners or more than 37,000 new F-Series truck bodies each month. KI