Ford drops bumper recycling program

Recyclers say Ford Motor Co. left independently owned collision repair shops and even some of its own dealerships "on an island" when it canceled its core charge program for recycling lighting, bumper fascia and select light repair parts.

The program was eliminated, Ford said in an emailed statement to Plastics News, "in response to requests from dealers and collision repairers seeking a more streamlined parts management process. … This change will enable dealers and repairers to be more cost competitive and efficient in serving customers."

The bumper core, a typically rebuildable part, could be used as a partial trade-in for a new or rebuilt part, according to Ford's parts website.

"Similar to the deposit paid for a returnable can or bottle," the website said, "it is an additional charge at the time of purchase to promote the return of the core when the part is replaced. When the core is returned, the charge is refunded."

"I'm guessing there's about 40,000-50,000 bumpers a month that were a part of that recycling program that are now not," said Dave Hartman, a co-owner of automotive plastics recycler Carhart Products Inc. in Saranac, Mich.

Ford hasn't made clear if a plan is in place to absorb those excess bumper cores, Hartman said.

"They've had this program in place for 15-20 years," he said. "Bumper remanufacturers don't exist anymore. There's not a lot of them left. Programs like the Ford core program ran those guys out of business. Collision shops were forced to return those bumpers back to Ford or pay $75. They returned them, they got recycled, and it was a good program. But they took the bumper out of their hands, and they didn't have anything they could sell anymore."

Carhart, which often works with dealerships and also transports the cores to its facility, has already gotten calls from Ford dealers looking to recycle core materials, Hartman said.

"We have a solution when we're in their backyard," he said. "But there's Ford dealerships all over the country, and there's not a lot of people that recycle that material.

"There's not much a dealership can do with it except throw it in the dumpster," Hartman added. "For an independently owned collision shop to take it upon themselves to recycle that material, it's just not realistic."

The 6-pound, 6-foot-long plastic bumpers "are difficult to move around, ship, handle and they're difficult to throw away," he said. "It takes up a lot of space in a landfill."

"By our numbers, there's 150 million pounds of automotive plastic bumpers going into a landfill every year from just post-collision," he said. "Ford had a program that could fix that, and they walked away from it. It just seems like they could have made a simpler process and just continued on with recycling.

"It's really a terrible shame that we had to take a step backwards," Hartman added.

Virginia Whelan, executive director of the Automotive Recyclers Association Educational Foundation, called the news of the program's elimination in June "a total disappointment."

"They left me with a huge question mark," Whelan said, "and Ford didn't give much background on why."

"Any kind of automotive plastics reuse or recycling, we need the buy-in from the manufacturers," she said. "I don't think that Ford can step away from it. … There has to be a core stream value, a marketplace."

Fees to dump waste in landfills are "ever escalating," Whelan said, "because of the reduction of landfill availability and the sheer volume of stuff we create as byproduct. … Unless Ford puts in place for its dealerships a network recycling system, I don't think it's going to be successful."

Bumper cores will stockpile unless dealers and repairers can get them to a market, she added. "Maybe Ford has a grander plan for that stepping forward."

By 2016, Whelan said, plastics recyclers' equipment and processes for prepping bumper cores for recycling became more sophisticated and less labor-intensive. Because Ford kept the program internal, she said, mostly between the manufacturer and its dealers, it didn't deliver a lot of information to the public about how the program worked. So, she said, it's hard to know what went wrong in the process.

"In any infrastructure for recycling, there are many moving parts," Whelan said. "It's a cottage business. It requires serious investment, time and labor. Ford could get all that product back, but we don't know how they were getting them. … If they had advertised that they'll take back all of their bumpers, my industry would have inundated them.

"The missing part," Whelan said, for the dealers and possibly for Ford, may have been economic incentive. "Transportation was always a big issue," she added.

Ford would not share any costs or profits related to the program with Plastics News.

"Ford recycles a lot of material, and they made a lot of changes in the industry itself that were very positive … and I am sure they are working on even better things," Hartman said. "Bumpers bigger than 11-year-old children are going to landfills every day in staggering numbers.

"It is easy to be a part of the problem," he said. "But there has to be some accountability from manufacturers along the way."

Dearborn, Mich.-based Ford launched its Core Recovery Program in 2003, initially focused on large metal parts such as engine components and valuable electronic sensors and fuel injectors. In 2011, it added bumpers and headlights, noting a wealth of potential plastics for recycling, according to a 2013 Plastics News report.