Ford turns plastic bottles into carpets to help recycle more than one billion drinks containers every year

Ford has found a clever way to reuse millions of plastic bottles, by incorporating them into the carpets of every EcoSport SUV that the company produces.

Each carpet is made using 470 single-use plastic bottles.

Since Ford launched the EcoSport in 2012, it has provided a new lease of life for more than 650 million 500ml bottles, weighing an estimated 8,262 tonnes, and that, if laid end to end, would stretch more than twice around the world.

Since first using recycled plastic in the Mondeo model more than 20 years ago, Ford now recycles 1.2 billion bottles globally per year.

Tony Weatherhead, Materials Engineer at Ford, said: “Consumers have a hugely increased awareness of the harm that simply discarded plastic can do, but we have long been on a mission to increase the proportion of recycled and renewable materials that are used in every new car we make.”