Ever wonder what happened to the oil booms that soaked up oil in the Gulf of Mexico just 13 months ago?  100 miles of boom found their way into the Chevrolet Volt, but GM has since updated their numbers.

Since the original announcement, 227 miles of boom – about the distance from Detroit to South Bend, Ind. – will become recycled material in one production years’ worth of air-deflecting baffles on the Chevrolet Volt, more than double the original total.

“We applaud GM for moving beyond traditional corporate responsibility efforts and finding a way to turn a portion of the waste from one of the worst environmental challenges in our nation’s history into something valuable,” said Corey Lambrecht, president of Earth911, Inc., host of the nation’s largest recycling directory. “We need more, creative cleanup and recycling efforts like these.”

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill had serious consequences to both the environment and local economy. But this initiative to extend the material’s lifecycle shows a positive and innovative outcome.

Using the recycled booms, whose oil and water was refined or used for energy, allowed GM and its supplier partners to:

•    Reuse 227 miles of the absorbent boom material  
•    Save 29,000 gallons of water and oil from the nation’s landfills
•    Eliminate 212,500 pounds of waste from being thrown out
•    Eliminate 149 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions from entering the air

GM partnered with Heritage Environmental, Mobile Fluid Recovery and GDC, Inc., who worked together on the process to recycle the booms into car parts in a cost-neutral way.