In most of the developed world we're constantly implored all the time to recycle more than we already do, but as individuals there's only so much we can achieve. That is, unless you're an individual called Chip Conrad and you work as a stamping engineer for Ford in the United States.

Chip is special because he's responsible for leading the design of an expansive closed-loop recycling system for Ford. This system now allows the American automotive giant to reduce the amount of waste it produces, to save considerable amounts of energy and to improve sustainability overall. And it's now responsible for efficiently recycling as much as 20 million pounds of aluminum each month.

What Ford is doing is pretty straightforward in some respects. The excess aluminum left behind after body panels are stamped out of sheets of the high-strength military-grade, lightweight metal is recycled to make new sheets for more body panels to be stamped out of.

The closed-loop recycling system now being employed at the Kentucky Truck and Buffalo Stamping facilities is a large, automated vacuum system with in excess of two miles of tubes crisscrossing the plants. The scrap material left behind after stamping is shredded into small pieces of around the size of a dollar bill. These are then sucked into the recycling system and sent in seconds, using computer-controlled gates, to a multi-ton pile in the back of a truck. The system is aware which of the four different grades of alloy is being stamped at any one time, and therefore sends the scrap to the appropriate one of four waiting trucks to be taken for recycling.

Using high-strength military-grade in production of its F-Series pickup trucks provides best-in-class capabilities and efficiency, which already leads to improved sustainability. Recycling the scrap aluminum further adds to the company's sustainability as recycling it uses one-tenth of the energy it takes to produce new aluminum.

To give an idea of just how much is being recycled -- enough to build as many as 51 commercial jetliners or more than 37,000 new F-Series truck bodies each month.