Jose Cuervo & Ford are teaming up to change the world.
Jose Cuervo announced a new eco-friendly collaboration with Ford Motor Company this past #TequilaTuesday. Ford will be utilizing Jose Cuervo’s excess Agave byproducts in their vehicles to mold and create sustainable materials. What better time to announce this initiative when National Tequila Day is just around the corner on Sunday July 24th. Jose Cuervo is also launching a new swimsuit line inspired by the ever-awesome agave plant. We were able to speak with Ford’s Senior Technical Leader of Sustainable Materials, Debbie Mielewski about the initiative and the process behind using agave.
Can you tell us about your role with the company and the new initiative?
I am the senior technical leader of sustainable leaders at Ford and my mission is to replace the 400 pounds of plastic on typical vehicles with greener more sustainable alternatives so the project has evolved from 15 years ago with soy foam that we put on the 2008 Mustang. Now every single one of our vehicles built in North America have soy foam seat cushions, back and head rests. We have soy in headliners in the Ford Escape. The project has grown. We’ve done wheat straw with Canada because it’s too cold to compost there and so as we’ve evolved, we’ve thought about using materials that are in abundance at various locations where we assemble vehicles so that’s where the Jose Cuervo idea came from.
Can you talk more about the collaboration and how it began?
We were thinking about our plant in Mexico and what types of material might be considered waste products and where we could utilize them so we started to look at Jose Cuervo – they’re a huge supplier, the world’s biggest supplier of tequila and they harvest 200-300 tons of agave each day and so imagine the amount of fiber when they’re done extracting the juice. So we contacted them and talked about whether that material was in fact considered a waste product and whether they utilized all of it and of course they didn’t so we learned more about their company. They’re an old company that’s family owned and we’re an old company that’s family owned so immediately there was excitement around partnering together to reduce our impact on the planet by using this agave so they sent us some initial samples. Since then we’ve ahd several different refinements of the fiber sent to us. We compound it with plastic and chop it to the size we need and now we’re at the point where we’re ready to mold some parts.
How long have you been working on this initiative and how long did it take to come to fruition?
The initiative has been 15 years. Soy foam had a lot of technical hurdles to achieve before we could make meet all the legal standards. That was the longest one-5 years for soy foam. With wheat straw in Canada it was about 18 months from conception of the idea to putting it into the vehicles. We don’t know exactly how long this will take because we need to mold parts, test them for various applications and think about how supply stream for the material would be generated.
Can you tell us about your hopes and goals for the initiative?
My hope is that as we become a more populated planet that we utilize things as efficiently as we can and just be able to reduce our impact on the environment and leave our kids and the next generation clean water and clean air and I have a lot of support from Ford Motor Company to work towards that goal.
Anything else you’d like to add?
I don’t think I mentioned that these materials are lighter in weight than what they’re replacing and the added advantage is improved fuel economy for the customer. You burn less fuel you produce less CO2. We are really able to think outside the box when we’re trying to make polymers or plastic materials out of carbon dioxide itself, greenhouse gas. These are long-term goals but it’s sort of surprising how these things are possible by working with other industries like Coca Cola, P&G, Nike, which we’ve been working with for years and now we’re able to make the vision come to fruition faster.
