Is this the end for leather seats in cars?

Upcoming changes to the European Union’s recycling and reuse rules are forcing car-makers to change the way they engineer and build cars, says BMW.

One of the changes will be that BMW, and other car-makers, will start pushing cloth and textile seat trims as more luxurious than leather, for both CO2 and other environmental reasons.

According to BMW’s Project Leader for Exterior and Interior Design for the Supply Chain, Andreas Vetter, the upcoming regulations will force car-makers to build cars from the inside out for the first time.

And, with higher built-in CO2 emissions coming from the new wave of electric cars, cleaning up the parts chain will be more critical than ever.

While 85 per cent of every new car must be recyclable today, proposed European rules would take that deep into the 95 per cent range.

BMW hinted at its new recycling direction with the BMW i Vision Circular concept car at the IAA show in Munich earlier this year.

The chunky, funky urban concept was engineered around bio-based raw materials and built with 100 per cent recycled materials to achieve total recyclability.

Vetter insisted no old or new technology would be ruled out to meet the new rules. He warned to expect natural fibres like hemp and flax (already popular with the German premium car-makers) to make a comeback, while recycled plastics would feature prominently as well.

With wiring harnesses and electrical cabling becoming an EU focus, one of the keys would be the connection systems used in future cars, with the i Vision Circular’s concepts of easily detachable connections making their debut in mainstream BMWs at some point later this decade.

“We now have to design and build a car we can efficiently un-build,” Vetter admitted.

“Electric cables will have to be recycled in the EU, and they are about the first things that go into a car. The battery recycling, too, is the most focused area of recycling in cars today.

“It’s one of the most explored and analysed areas and all of our batteries have been reused for our buildings and around the plants.”

BMW is the only European car-maker to fill its specification sheets with the level of CO2 emitted during its cars’ manufacture, as well as during its on-road life, and it is working on pulling down those CO2 contributions from raw materials.

That alone is pivoting the company towards using recycled or refurbished materials, and Vetter said some of the choices were surprising.

Apart from the use of natural-fibre interior trims, massive changes are coming in the way everything from alloy wheels to floor mats are made.

Next year’s all-new Mini EV will become a pioneer in the car industry by using alloy wheels made completely from recycled metal, for example.

BMW was the first car-maker to commit to a 1.5-degree global temperature reduction by 2030, but that will force it to reduce its internal CO2 emissions by 80 per cent from 2019 levels.

It’s Vetter’s job to make sure BMW hits those targets and he has a team investigating every part in every BMW for possible reductions in the energy that goes into making it, and simplifying how it can be recycled.

The other key expectation is to do all this while maintaining the quality and durability that customers expect, whether it be in areas they can’t see or in recycled metals.

“We need to do this backwards now,” Vetter said. “Instead of making everything from scratch, we have to find ways to make everything with a lower environmental footprint, that can be easily recycled when its useful life has ended.

“We want to increase secondary materials to 50 per cent, at a minimum,” Vetter said.

“Steel is normally 10-15 per cent recycled, and that’s up to 50 per cent for aluminum, and 30 per cent of sheet metal is recycled.”

There are strong environmental reasons for recycling as much metal as possible – an awful lot of CO2 is emitted in metal production, and it varies enormously depending on where it is made.

“Normally in Europe, you have 2.4kg of CO2 for every 2kg of steel,” Vetter said.

“The electric car route takes that down to 0.6kg CO2/kg, with hydrogen-based steel, but we think we can come down to 0.3kg.”

“In China, steel still costs 3.1kg of CO2 per kilo, while aluminum is about 20.5kg, but in Europe aluminum is 8.5kg/kg. And if we use renewable energy to make it we can come down to four to five kilos,” Vetter insisted.

“If you then add secondary [re-used] aluminum, we can pull it down more.”

While recycling off-cut steel back into cars isn’t a desirable thing, automotive-quality steels are highly sought after in the building industry, where the CO2 is locked away for decades.

The other major area of improvement will be in streamlining the use of artificial fibres and moving to natural fibres where possible.

“Already, 100 per cent of the under-floor material is a recycled insulation from old clothes,” Vetter admitted.

Replacing carbon fibres in CFRP won’t work in structural elements, but Vetter insists it’s a good idea in other areas and hemp or flax fibres are lighter and have a smaller environmental footprint.

“By 2030 we will replace about 40 per cent of thermoplastic with recycled materials,” Vetter said.

“Recycled material has a production issue in long-lasting quality with external parts, so today it’s only on parts we do not paint.”

Spain’s incoming Cupra brand has teamed with the Seaqual Initiative to pull discarded plastic from the Mediterranean Sea to be recycled into the seat fibres for its Born electric car.

Both Mercedes-Benz and Audi also used recycled fibres in its cars, but the BMW Group plans to dive much deeper into recycling.

“We want to move away from leather and lead a revival of textile in the seats.

“Leather doesn’t breathe. It’s painted and treated so that breathing doesn’t happen anymore, and hasn’t happened for years,” Vetter admitted.

“Three per cent of the monetary value from a cow is the skin, so three per cent of the cow CO2 is the skin, and that’s how we have to calculate it.”

“Bio-based artificial leather is being developed because the current artificial leather uses crude oil as the base product.

“But we are looking at natural fibre composites and if we can convince people to return to fibres it would help a surprising amount.”