GM adopts greener approach to painting plastic car parts

Working suppliers, General Motors has introduced flame treatment technology in other words helping transform painting plastic car parts into a greener process. The innovation uses robotics to change the surface of the plastic, which makes the paint adhere better and eliminates the need for primers. The company that came up with the research, FTS Technologies, captured GM’s attention through a group called Suppliers Partnership for the Environment.

The potential of this process

“Once I understood the potential of this process, we worked to connect the right GM engineers and our suppliers. As we strive to design all of our vehicles for the environment, we can create requirements for our suppliers. In such a case, we were able to provide the enabling innovation, making it easier for all of us.”

GM notes that using the innovation paint parts on the Cruze models has helped reduce the solid and liquid waste related to the process to less than one ton per year, compared with 48 tons earlier. The pollutants released to air while the process are now 80 tons, compared with 810 tons. Waste-to-landfill was reduced to nearly zero from 25 tons.

Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist with a passion for green research and corporate sustainability issues. Her articles have appeared in Entrepreneur, Fortune Small Business, The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. In a past corporate life, Heather was editor of Computer Reseller News, where she was a featured speaker about everything from software as a service to IT security to mobile computing.

Heather started her journalism life as a business writer with United Press International in New York. She holds a B.A. in English literature from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and has a thing for Lewis Carroll. When she's not hunting for a great green story, she's singing a cappella or scuba-diving with her husband, Joe.

My daily writing is focused on looking for topics for my blogs, GreenTech Pastures and Business Brains. I as well write often about emerging innovation trends just as mobile computing, unified communications and cloud computing. Occasionally, I will pop up at an industry conference in some sort of speaking capacity. In cases where a speaking engagement involves a sponsor that may be covered in this blog, that fact will be disclosed in coverage as the case may be.

My corporate writing work in the main consists of crafting technology white papers about some aspect of research. After all that my commentary mentions a company for which I have provided consulting advice, I will disclose that fact. Nevertheless, there is no connection between these projects and the topics that I'm covering in my blog.