Mazda has used partially recycled materials and door trims created from recycled PET (polyester) bottles.Mitchell Hubble/Mazda
Giving up a gasoline-powered vehicle in favour of an electric car can be a big step toward reducing one’s personal carbon footprint. But for environmentally conscious drivers, a holistic approach to sustainability goes well beyond what’s happening under the hood.
As consumers increasingly prioritize their spending on greener products, one major purchase that’s getting a sustainable makeover is the car. In an industry-wide shift, automakers of all types are making big investments in sustainable innovations for their designs, including where drivers engage with their vehicles the most – the interior.
“When most people think about sustainability in the auto industry, they usually think about emissions,” says Debbie Mielewski, the head of the technical sustainable materials group at Ford Motor Co.
And with the federal government aiming to have combustion-engine cars phased out in Canada by 2035, electric-vehicle technology is crucial for companies such as Ford. The automaker will continue to develop the category with a $30-billion investment through 2025, according to Ford chief futurist Sheryl Connelly, who is in charge of long-term thinking, planning and strategy at the company,
But in tandem with advancements in electric vehicles is work Mielewski’s team does researching, identifying and implementing recycled content and plant-based materials. The goal is to use such materials to produce parts that maintain or exceed the performance and quality of parts traditionally made primarily from virgin plastics. “We look at waste streams to turn literal trash into treasure for our products,” Mielewski says.
Ms. Connelly says Ford has been innovating in plant-based materials as an alternative to petroleum-based plastics since 2000. Ford began using material such as soy-based foam in 2007, wheat straw in 2010, kenaf in 2013, rice hulls and cellulose in 2014 and coffee chaff in 2019 for things including seating, storage containers, doors and headlights. More recently, it became the first automaker to produce car parts of 100-per-cent recycled plastics retrieved from oceans, such as discarded plastic fishing nets, which are used to make wiring harness clips in the Ford Bronco Sport. “These materials have helped to improve production efficiency, support vehicle weight reductions and avoid the use of fossil-fuel-based plastics,” Connelly says.
“Almost everything in the interior is a petroleum-based product or it’s not a recyclable product,” says Carla Bailo, president and chief executive officer of Center for Automotive Research, based in Ann Arbour, Mich. She says that, in keeping with automakers’ sustainability goals and the rapidly evolving function cars have in our lives, research in this area has ramped up recently. “As we think about the future of vehicle life cycles getting shorter and shorter and ride-sharing services, you really want to be able to disassemble the products and recycle the materials rather than just filling up our landfills.”
In addition to materials selection, Bailo says that optimizing the manufacturing process to reduce waste is important to car manufacturers’ goals of creating a circular life cycle for the product. “Not only is that sustainable, it’s just really efficient to not have all that scrappage, because scrappage is just dollars going out the door.”
As the creators of performance-led products, car designers are used to looking for efficiencies and optimizations through material selection and by avoiding waste and excess. But, in general, those properties are “hidden inside engineering components which are not very visible to the driver,” says Ian Hedge, senior manager of design at Mazda North American Operations in Irvine, Calif.
Mazda has incorporated cork in its in the centre console storage area of the MX-30.Andrew Holliday Photography 2018/Mazda
With its MX-30 electric vehicle, Mazda has incorporated cork in its in the centre console storage area, around the cup holders and in the door grips. Made of leftovers from the production of wine bottle stoppers, it joins seat fabrics that use partially recycled materials and door trims created from recycled PET (polyester) bottles.
“From manufacturing, to shipping, to day-to-day operation, we want our vehicles to have a positive impact on people’s lives and the environment,” Hedge says. “The materials which are used in the MX-30 and other Mazda vehicles are small, but important, parts of this overall way of thinking.”
At Mercedes-Benz, sustainable materials innovation is a process that has become entrenched in its operations, which includes reducing the use of primary raw materials while increasing renewable and recycled materials. One such example is its floor coverings, which are Econyl, a recycled yarn in tuft velour that’s made of recovered nylon waste, such as old fishing nets and carpet remnants, originally destined for landfill.
Even Formula 1 teams are getting on board. In 2020, McLaren partnered with Swiss sustainable light-weighting specialist Bcomp to develop a natural-fibre racing seat, a first for the sport. Made of flax fibres, it has the durability required for competitive racing and a CO2 footprint that’s 75-per-cent lower than those made of carbon fibre. What’s more, the material is biodegradable, so that the seat can be ground down to be disposed of or recycled at the end of its life. It’s part of British-based McLaren’s goal of sending zero waste to landfill from all of its operations, including those trackside, by 2023.
Swedish automaker Volvo has developed a material called Nordico, which is made from recycled material such as PET bottles and cork from the wine industry as well as material sourced from sustainable forests in Finland and Sweden. And the company has said that all of its new fully electric models, starting with the C40 Recharge, will be free of leather.
“Normally people’s perception about sustainable material is some kind of a tradeoff they need to accept by visual or experience of anything,” says Eric Beak, head of design at Volvo USA in Camarillo, Calif. “As a company who puts sustainability as a main core value, we really need to be proactive and find a good solution as a way to have sustainable materials become a really nice luxurious product.”
Sustainable materials are a natural extension of Volvo’s philosophy of human-centric design, Beak says. “We need to think from the human so that we make decisions that are right for people, not just the product itself.”
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