Despite its high price, the electric “will be hammer-free,” said Ms Vidrick. “We’ll be using leatherette with a technical, repeatable, inorganic grain.” And Ford is looking at a wider variety of leather options, Dr. Milewski said.
Austrian company Lenzing makes fiber from trees growing in sustainable forests and supplies it to Range Rover for the seats in its Evoque. It is also working on projects with Audi and Volvo, creating woven “sustainable luxury” materials as an alternative to leather, said George Spindler, the company’s manager for special applications.
Yet using the proper ingredients isn’t the whole fight. Even as a vehicle reaches the end of its life, recycling sustainable products can be a challenge.
BMW is designing vehicles with a small number of large components to make recycling easier. Polestar wants to make sure the foam, which would make recycling difficult, doesn’t stick to its clothing.
And while not an immediate problem, car makers are figuring out how to eventually recycle the millions of electric vehicle batteries and their manufacturing scraps. This May, GM announced that it and LG Energy Solutions committed to recycle battery materials, including cobalt, nickel, lithium, graphite, copper, manganese and aluminum, with 95 percent of the ingredients available for use in the production of new batteries. Will be 2.3 billion will be invested. . The process emits 30 percent less greenhouse gas than standard methods.
And Audi is working with a German-Indian company to use recycled batteries to supply green energy to rural Indian villages.
“These things make sense to do for humanity,” Dr. Milewski said.