It’s summer time and everyone is carrying a bottle of water or another beverage. Look around and you’ll find plastic beverage bottles nearly everywhere – on desks and in break rooms at work, on kitchen tables and counters at home, rolling under seats in cars, on the sidelines of athletic fields and heaped in trash cans and recycling bins.

And, once they’re empty, plastic beverage bottles are seemingly not of much use. Except at Ford.

Ford Motor Company recycles 25 20-ounce plastic bottles to make the carpeting in the Ford Escape utility vehicle. The Escape represents the first time Ford has used this type of carpeting in an SUV. “It’s a good use of recycled product and keeps it out of landfills,” said Laura Sinclair, Ford engineer and mother of two young boys whose job is to make sure all materials meet Ford durability standards.

Consider the positive impact this type of use can have on the environment:

• Total all-time sales of the next-generation Escape through June of this year were about 277,000.
• Multiply that number by 25, the number of bottles used in the carpeting, and you get 6,925,200 bottles potentially diverted from landfills. That’s right: nearly 7 million
• The environmental news potentially gets even better because Escape is one of Ford’s best-selling vehicles. In fact, 156,626 Escapes had been sold this year alone through the end of June.
• If that rate continues, that means nearly an additional 1.5 million bottles potentially could be diverted from landfills, bringing the total to more than 8 million bottles

Learn more: http://ford.to/1qWFgZe