At GM, when we develop new vehicles our designers and engineers work to find ways to improve the impact our products will have on the environment throughout their entire lifecycle. We look at everything from the materials that go into our vehicles and the manufacturing processes used to build them, to energy consumption on the road and the recyclability of our vehicles at the end of their useful life.
Vehicle Design
Components of the headliner in the 2010 Buick
Lacrosse are made from recycled cardboard
scrap salvaged from manufacturing operations at
GM’s Marion Assembly plant in Marion, Indiana.
When designing new vehicles, we use recycled and bio-based materials from renewable resources whenever economically and technically possible. Engineers in our “Design for the Environment” group work with materials and components suppliers to identify opportunities to continually increase the use of these materials. Recycled materials in our products come from a variety of origins – from things like old pop bottles, blue jeans and nylon carpet, to used tires and recycled vehicle bumpers. In fact, we’re even beginning to explore some opportunities to use recycled waste products from our own manufacturing facilities in parts for our new vehicles. This allows for an entire closed loop process where we can divert waste that may otherwise go to landfill butinstead is put to good use as part of a new product.
The 2010 Chevrolet Corvette uses renewable balsa wood, the fastest growing tree in the world, in its floor panel. Fibers from the kenaf plant, a quick growing, tall-stalky plant, are used to create a component of the headliner in the 2010 Chevrolet Equinox.
GM's Lora Herron is a materials engineer who helps to make GM vehicles more sustainable through the use of recycled and bio-based parts and components.
Finding New Life for Old Vehicles
When our vehicles reach the end of their useful life for their owners, we want to ensure that what happens to those vehicles is responsible for the environment. To help make this happens, we design our vehicles to be as recyclable and recoverable as is feasible, and we work to implement these designs on our vehicles around the world. We follow industry ISO standards on vehicle recycling and recoverability and we have developed internal global standards as well to gain common benefits across regions. Today, GM vehicles are at least 85 percent recyclable and 95 percent recoverable (by weight). We work directly with the vehicle dismantling industry to help make sure that the majority of material in our vehicles is salvaged and can be recycled or reused in new vehicles or other consumer products.
