There's one word you may not know exactly what it is, but you've heard it many times this year, and that's "carbon neutral."
Almost every business is scrambling to come up with its own carbon reduction targets to make the environment sustainable. But is it easy to reduce your carbon footprint?
There is an interesting data: in 2020, when the epidemic swept the world, the previously rising greenhouse gas emissions finally put the brakes on, and the global annual carbon emissions were more than 48 billion tons, 5% lower than the previous year.
If there is a 5% decline every year, the global carbon emissions can be cut in half in another sixteen years, and the goal of carbon neutrality seems to be just around the corner.
But how have we spent the year? Months of home isolation, millions of deaths around the world, tens of millions of people losing their jobs, countless factories shut down, the world divided... And carbon emissions have only decreased by 5%, so is the decline too small? Moreover, we simply cannot afford that cost.
As a result, more and more new technologies, new processes, and new products are being used in carbon emission reduction and sustainable development, such as electric vehicles that we are all familiar with.
But is it enough to replace gasoline-dependent engines with power batteries and reduce carbon emissions when driving?
Statistics show that a car only accounts for 16% of the carbon emissions when it is used, while the supply chain produces up to 84% of the carbon emissions. This 84% carbon emissions run through the life of a car: from a pile of raw materials into a car, transported to the user's hands, to the car scrapped and recycled. It can be said that the electrification of the automobile is only the first step and the most important step in the long march.
If we want to make cars "green" more thorough, we need to have a "green revolution" from head to toe.
A "Green Revolution" throughout the life cycle
At the Munich Motor Show two months ago, BMW unveiled the BMW i Vision Circular, depicting a "zero-carbon" concept that is 100% recyclable.
"Zero carbon" may be a bit of a distant concept for us now, but car carbon reduction is not a quick 100-meter sprint, but a long marathon relay race that requires group combat. This relay race needs to be completed from the design draft, raw materials, and production lines on the jumping paper to the final completion of the whole vehicle. In the innovative BMW iX, we can see this collaborative result throughout the vehicle's lifecycle.
As a pure electric vehicle, the innovative BMW iX has been designed at the beginning of the design to reduce the wind resistance coefficient and reduce the energy consumption during the driving process of the vehicle.
On the interior, we don't see chrome or carbon fiber decorative panels, but instead minimalist design language and more environmentally sustainable raw materials: the control panel on the centre console is made of sustainably produced FSC certified wood; the leather seats are treated with olive leaf extract instead of traditional tanning preparations, which come from leaves collected every year after pruning olive groves in Europe...
In the production process, BMW's global factories, including the Shenyang manufacturing base, have used 100% renewable energy electricity, such as hydropower, wind power, solar power, etc.; the aluminum material used in the iX body is also produced by solar power. That is to say, in the current production process of iX this car, whether it is the production line of the factory, or the lighting and transportation in the plant, the electrical energy used does not produce carbon emissions when generating electricity.
These innovative technologies for every part and every link of the car make a car greener and more environmentally friendly without sacrificing driving pleasure, comfort and full of power. It also allows a pure electric vehicle not only to have "zero" emissions when in use, but also to reduce carbon emissions in production and manufacturing, and to make the "greenest" electric vehicle.
Recycling and recycling, turning "garbage" into treasure
While reducing carbon emissions from automobiles, in the face of the continuous growth of car ownership, it is difficult to ignore one point:
There are more and more new cars, more and more new products, what about those old products? End up going to landfills and incinerators?
It reminds me of a news story a few months ago: a 200-pound turtle was killed by accidentally eating about 6 kilograms of marine litter. This marine litter is the mineral water bottles we have used, surfboards, plastic bags, and even old fishing nets. More than 1 million seabirds go through the same experience each year, as well as 300,000 dolphins and finless porpoises that die from abandoned fishing nets...
The "enemies" of these marine life - discarded plastics, waste fishing nets also have a common "ancestor", that is, oil.
While reprocessing the refined petroleum products to obtain new fishing nets and plastic bottles, people emit greenhouse gases; on the other hand, they throw old fishing nets and old plastics into the sea, bringing secondary pollution to the environment. Similarly, there are metals, on the one hand, mining and smelting, to obtain new metal parts; on the other hand, there are also a large number of scrap metals that are discarded because they are difficult to recycle.
Recycling and reusing this "waste" not only reduces carbon dioxide emissions from newly produced raw materials, but also reduces the amount of waste that is discarded.
On the innovative BMW iX, there are around 60 kilograms of parts made of recycled plastic: the fabric/microfiber upholstery is made of 50% recycled polyester, which is made of recycled plastic, and the 100% recycled nylon material used in carpet floor mats comes from recycled old fishing nets and plastic products... These recycled materials have transformed plastic from the "oil - new plastic - garbage" model to "oil - new plastic - waste plastic - new plastic - new plastic - waste plastic..."
Not only can marine garbage be recycled, but discarded rare earths and steel can be found to "turn waste into treasure". In the iX's power battery, the amount of secondary nickel used for recycling and reuse reaches 50%, and 30% of the aluminum used in the battery shell is recycled secondary aluminum. These recycled secondary aluminum save 4 to 6% of carbon dioxide compared with raw aluminum.
In addition to using recycled materials, iX was designed with future car recycling in mind. When designing the body wiring, avoid the mixing of iron and copper in the vehicle cable harness to ensure the purity of the material when recycling; the interior parts of the car are also used as much as possible to use a single material to achieve a higher recovery rate when recycling; at the same time, the fixed connection is not fixed without the use of adhesive, making it easier to separate during recycling, and different materials will not mix with each other.
The recycling of these waste waste and metal materials makes 30% of the materials on the iX recycled materials, and the design of the convenience of future recycling also allows the iX to reach the future after the use period, and 95% of the whole vehicle can be recycled. In order to carry out recycling, BMW has also laid out 3,000 vehicle recycling points around the world.
At last
In our traditional concept, luxury cars always seem to be accompanied by high horsepower power, excellent driving experience, and even leather seats with exquisite materials... In the era of electric vehicles, when power batteries replaced engines, when digital horsepower replaced mechanical horsepower, precious metals and animal leathers were no longer luxury labels, but were replaced by green, sustainable concepts introduced by more and more brands.
This is not only an environmental protection concept, but also from the reality of cost considerations. We cannot deny the current "premium" of environmental protection itself: the research and development of new technologies, the challenges of production lines, the small-scale manufacturing of new materials and new products, which invisibly increase the investment of products.
Therefore, "to be the greenest electric vehicle" is not only a slogan, but also requires courage to invest and persist.