Water

Case Study: Ford Manufacturing Water Saving Technologies

Ford has already achieved its goal of decreasing water use per vehicle by 30 percent from 2009 to 2015. This graphic highlights some of the technologies that helped us reach our goal.

3-Wet Paint Technology

This technology enables consolidation of painting activities in an integrated booth, offering the potential to eliminate one booth water wash section, depending on plant design.

Dry Paint Overspray System

This system eliminates water usage from the painting process, resulting in an 80 percent water savings for air conditioning/air tempering and 100 percent water savings from paint-over-spray separation, based on production volume of 158,000 units per year.

Minimum Quantity Lubricant (MQL)

MQL uses an extremely small amount of oil versus conventional wet-machining. For a typical production line of 450,000 vehicles, MQL can save 282,000 gallons of water per year.

Internal Water Metering

We are increasing usage of internal water metering to identify additional water saving opportunities and drive conservation behaviors to the department level. This has the potential to save approximately $75,000 on average per plant globally.

Cooling Tower Technology

Cooling towers are one of the biggest users of water at our plants. We’re using new technologies such as electrolytic water softening to increase cooling tower cycles of concentration, thus lowering water consumption.