Will Your Old Jeans End up in Ford's 2012 Focus?

They could, since the company is using post-consumer cotton that comes from recycled blue jeans.

The cotton ends up in carpet backing and sound-absorption materials for the interior of the Focus.

Carrie Majeske, product sustainability manager at Ford Motor company says the company is continually looking for greener alternatives. "Right now the cotton that we use isn't something people would particularly want to look at so we use it on parts of the vehicle that are not visible, but it's very useful in noise insulation and sound deadening and softening things and it provides good padding , and using cotton eliminates us from using something that's petroleum based or potentially has to be mined or processed otherwise."

And this isn't the first time that Ford has used recycled materials in its cars. It uses recycled resins for underbody systems as well as recycled yarns to make seat covers.

"We have recycled content in a lot of the plastics, anything under the car that's black or under the hood that's black a lot of times will have recycled nylon in it. We have some nylon in the fabrics that comes from pop bottles, we have those types of materials and some of exterior panels, the plastic bumper, those types of things, so it's all over the car," she added.