BMW PLANS COMPLETELY RECYCLABLE CAR

Don’t junk that old beater. Drop it off at the recycling center.
OK, not yet, but BMW plans to make a car by 2040 that can be disassembled and recycled down to the tail light LEDs.
The dashboard is made from wood, the carpet and velvet-like upholstery from recycled plastic, the tires from sustainably harvested rubber and recycled tires, and the exterior of the concept car is an unpainted, anodized aluminum in a light gold, capped at the rear with a purple steel shell surrounding the rear hatch door.
Novel joinery methods allow the parts of the car to be snapped apart quickly when replacements are needed or when the all-electric “CirCular,” as BMW has named it, reaches the end of its days, the company said.
The name refers to the circular economy, in which someone’s waste and junk is someone else’s feedstock. The goal: circular birth, life, and rebirth of materials, with no off ramp leading to a scrap heap.
The CirCular has nothing like a traditional instrument panel; instead, a blue crystal-like wedge juts out of the dashboard and projects speed, battery level, and other data onto the bottom of the windshield in front of the driver.
But the car itself is only the beginning.
“A sustainable car cannot just be to reduce, reuse and recycle materials,” Domagoj Dukec, BMW’s design chief, said in an interview with website DesignBoom. 
“It also needs to rethink construction, manufacturing processes, and look at our suppliers as well as customers’ desires,” he said.
On its website, BMW says that 85 percent of the components in its cars already can be recycled or are made from recycled materials.
TRENDPOST: If and when BMW makes its recyclable car, it probably won’t look exactly like this, or perhaps much like this at all.
The point of the concept car, aside from tickling greenies and car fans, is to nudge the industry toward thinking about how to keep making cars year after year in a world where the resources needed to build them are increasingly scarce and ever more costly.
By BMW’s target year of 2040, many of the components in a new car will be made from recycled materials and cars themselves will be designed to be easily disassembled for recycling.

BMW’s CirCular concept car

Credit: BMW