Hasta La Gadget!

Ford is taking a few extra steps to make the 2012 edition of the Focus a little more green by introducing recycled materials in the vehicles’ interior. The recycled cotton will be used for the car’s carpet backing and sound absorption material and will be available in models across both North America and Europe.

“Ford is continually looking for greener alternatives,” Carrie Majeske, product sustainability manager, said in a statement. “One of our key goals is to use more recycled or renewable materials without compromising performance or durability. Recycled content is a way to divert waste from landfills and reduce the impact of mining virgin material.”

The cotton used will be taken from discarded clothing like blue jeans, and each car will feature the equivalent of about two pairs of jeans worth of cotton. Not only does this mean that Ford is able to reuse these items so that they don’t end up in a landfill, but it also means that the company doesn’t have to grow any cotton in order to get the material it needs. And it looks like this may just be the beginning.

“The use of recycled clothing is one step, but what else are people discarding that could be used in our vehicles? Ford is determined to find out,” Majeske said.

Via Autoblog Green

When we first learned of the Biome–the strange Mercedes Benz concept vehicle that was literally grown from seeds–all we had to go on was an artist’s rendering. Now Mercedes has officially unveiled the project at the Los Angeles Auto Show, providing a few more details and a much closer look at the car.

The designers at BMW envision the lab grown car being made out of a currently non-existent material called BioFibre, which would be lighter than plastic and stronger than steel. It would then run on some sort of fuel called BioNectar4534, which, again, doesn’t currently exist. The Biome would be completely biodegradable and would produce no harmful emissions.

“The Mercedes Benz Biome is a natural technology hybrid, and forms part of our earth’s ecosystem,” Mercedes’ Hubert Lee explained. “It grows and thrives like the leaves on a tree–The interior of the Biome grows from the DNA in the Mercedes star on the front of the vehicle, while the exterior grows from the star on the rear. To accommodate specific customer requirements, the Mercedes star is genetically engineered in each case, and the vehicle grows when the genetic code is combined with the seed capsule. The wheels are grown from four separate seeds.”

Hit the jump for a better look at the Biome.

2012 may the year of the apocalypse, but it’s also the year of the recyclable subway car. In two years the country, with help from partners Siemens and BMW, is planning to introduce a new type of subway car that is 97.5 percent recyclable.

Called the Inspiro, the train features an aluminum chassis designed to be much lighter than traditional subways, and also much more spacious to accommodate better passenger flow. It also features a demand-controlled air conditioning system and electrodynamic braking, which, when coupled with the lightweight design means that the Inspiro requires less energy to run, and could potentially reduce energy consumption by up to 30 percent for the Polish subway system.

By the end of 2013 it’s expected that 35 of the trains will be in service, with nearly 40 percent of the manufacturing materials being sourced locally.

Via Treehugger

Starbucks sells a lot of coffee, and along with that coffee comes a lot of cups. Unfortunately, the company’s thin paper cups aren’t accepted by most recycling facilities. But a recently conducted pilot program suggests that the billion or so paper cups sold by Starbucks each year can be recycled into new cups.

The test took place over six weeks and saw the Mississippi River Pulp company take Starbucks’ paper cups, recycle them, and then turn them into new ones. Currently MRP is the only pulp mill in the country that has done this successfully. The news is all part of Starbucks’ goal of making sure all of its cups are either recyclable or reusable by 2015.

“This innovation represents an important milestone in our journey,” Jim Hanna, Starbucks director of Environmental Impact, said in a statement. “We still have a lot of work to do to reach our 2015 goal, but we’re now in a much stronger position to build momentum across the recycling industry. Our next step is to test this concept in a major city, which we plan to do in collaboration with International Paper and Mississippi River in 2011.”

Meanwhile, in New York, Starbucks is testing out a different type of recycling project, by seeing whether or not old cups can be turned in bath tissue and paper towels. A similar project will start next year in Chicago, where the company will attempt to recycle cups into usable napkins.

Via the New York Times

While electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt tend to dominate the headlines, there’s more to the plug-in scene than small passenger cars. Like super cars, for instance. At the Los Angeles Auto Show, Jaguar showed off its new C-X75 concept, which takes plug-in cars to a whole new level.

The C-X75 features four electric motors, each providing 195 horsepower, giving the sleek car a grand total of 780 electric horsepower. But, as a hybrid, the car also features two small micro-gas turbines, which can provide upwards of 180 additional horsepower. When in electric mode, the C-X75 has a range of nearly 70 miles. When the electric battery pack runs out of juice, that’s when the gas turbines kick in.

Via PluginCars.com