Sustainable materials we could see in future BMW models

Sustainability is the topic du jour, whether it’s recycling our plastics at home, upcycling an old piece of furniture or the car we drive. Simply creating an electric car isn’t enough — so says Kerstin Meerwaldt, head of sustainability customer experience for brands and markets at BMW in Germany.

It’s no surprise that this was the view, after all, we were at BMW’s sustainability and technology workshop in its Innovation Centre in Munich, Germany. Meerwaldt and her colleagues outlined many of the ways in which the world is changing in its approach to sustainability, but fascinatingly it was a BMW expert in the subject who asked the question “why have we not been doing this already?”

They didn’t have an answer, essentially because it is such a modern topic, one that has come about through both societal pressure and government policies in many key markets around the world. Change has been happening but behind the scenes, with Simone Börner, material development specialist at BMW, telling us that plant-based materials have been used by the carmaker for about 30 years, but they only grabbed the attention when they became visible, part of the interior design in the electric i3 early in the last decade.

Today everyone’s at it, from BMW to Bentley, and one of the main areas is in those interior materials. In 2023, both BMW and Mini models will be available with a completely vegan interior. This might not seem like such a big announcement, after all some have been claiming this for ages, but rivals like Tesla have been unable to replace leather on the steering wheels because no sustainable material can cope with the wear.

BMW claims it has a solution in a PVC-based type of leatherette, which can stand up to everything from sweaty palms to hand creams and, of course, hand sanitisers. It goes way beyond this though, to the materials used in seats.

BMW says secondary materials already make up 30% of the components in its cars, but it’s aiming to make the figure 50% in the coming years. It’s all well and good creating new materials in the lab, but it needs suppliers to create them in bulk for the millions of cars produced every year. It also needs us to want to have them, which we do obviously, because we’re all into sustainability and the environment, or we should be.

Just a few years ago, the companies that pulled fishing nets out of the ocean, chopped them into tiny pieces and then used them to make new materials, were small businesses. They were doing the right thing even before the world knew it wanted their products. Today they are not only in the business of sustainability, they are big businesses that are looking very sustainable.