Rice hulls-reinforced plastic in Ford trucks

Ford is using plastic reinforced with rice hulls – a byproduct of rice grain – in an electrical harness in its 2014 F-150 truck model. The company will need at least 45,000 pounds of hulls in the first year. The rice hulls are sourced from farms in Arkansas and will replace a talc-based reinforcement in a polypropylene composite made by RheTech, a Whitmore Lake, Mich.-based automotive supplier.