Cars don’t grow on trees, but Ford is designing car parts from olive tree cuttings. [via Electrek]
Ford is no stranger to designing parts from plants for their vehicles. Henry famously liked to beat on the Soy Bean Car with a blunted axe to tout the benefits of bioplastic panels. Researchers at Ford’s Cologne, Germany facility have detailed their work to use waste from olive orchards as part of a new biocomposite from the LIVE COMPOLIVE program.
Fibers from the olive tree cuttings are mixed with recycled plastic and injection molded to form panels. The video below features interior panels that are currently made with traditional plastics that could be swapped over to the new composite. Since these cuttings are a waste product from food production, there isn’t the tension akin to that presented via biofuels vs food. We’re curious what Precious Plastics could do with this, especially if the fibers are able to reinforce the matrix.
If you want to see some other unusual uses for waste wood, why not checkout a “paper” bottle or 3D printing with sawdust?
Are we going to see massive olive tree orchards competing with corn farmers for government subsidies – while people go hungry because its all going into cars?
Thankfully the EU is planning a Law against greenwashing. We need to help them to keep the money lobbyist away.
Plastic ist still harmfull plastic, even if you labeled it woth bio degreadable, its tooks still over 100 years and still harmfull.
Wow, the automobile manufacturer is making some wood (but mostly plastic) car parts for publicity. This shows that they really do care about the environment. 🙄
Greenwashing at its finest.
“Objectives
LIFE COMP0LIVE project (2019-2022) aims to develop a new generation of biocomposites based on olive pruning waste for industrial applications, by boosting the substitution of non-renewable resources through sustainable product design of wood-based fibers.”
PRUNING WASTE
Cue the comments on the Trabant… (it used cotton fiber, not olive wood, but similar)
The legend was that goats would eat Trabants.
Today, foxes are eating the soy-based plastic wiring harnesses off of cars.
That was my immediate thought too. Have they tried putting these parts into a cage with some hungry rats to see if they’re consumed?
Vw’s are subject to having assorted rodents eat the peanut based insulation on the harnesses.
But VW have a factory next to a chinese uigur camp. History from latin america repeats.
Has anyone tried putting capsaicin in the plastic, if it didn’t degrade the plastic it would keep mammals from chewing on it.
I don’t know, but I hear they’ve tried spraying them down with bitterants etc. and it didn’t work.
Hey making the Trabant out of cotton fiber was a good idea.
Duroplast wasn’t exactly just cotton fiber. It’s closer to bakelite than bioplastics, including the point of off-gassing formaldehyde. You can’t just toss it in a compost pile or burn it without proper emissions controls, and even if people did try to feed it to animals that was a highly irresponsible thing to do.
Tons of car parts including frames etc were made of wood long ago. May even be some botique British builders still using it. Airframes were/are too. I flew a K6 glider (I think it was…) from the 50’s that is in great shape and fun to fly, excellent performance too. All wood.
But there is a reason every hipster bike company that wants to make bamboo or wood frame bikes today has a tiny market. The material is inferior in every way except class which is, obviously, priceless.
It is my understanding wooden and bamboo bicycle are actually superior to ride, at least in many ways thanks to the behaviour of the ‘wood’ frame. Not as light and stiff as Carbon fibre for the road racing performance, but light and comfortably sprung to ride. No personal experience though, my last bike has a steel frame of really excessive weight…
Dense natural wood and good plywood have surprisingly similar damping coefficients to steel – which is not so surprising after all considering they’re used in musical instruments where sustaining vibrations is a desirable effect. From what I understand, carbon fiber and hardened light alloys like aluminum and magnesium are worse at damping vibrations compared to steel.
Whether it’s better to have a stiff frame or a flexible frame on a bicycle depends on the point of the bike. Stiffer frames (and no shocks) loses less energy, making it lighter to ride – if a bit less comfortable. If the bike bobs up and down like a boat on water, the suspension system is doing more work to dissipate that energy, and that energy comes from you pedaling the bike.
Or it might be that there’s just less mass with the lighter materials to take up the kinetic energy, so it just shoots right through to your hands whenever you hit a bump.
If you strike a 7 kilo carbon fiber frame with a 100 Joule jolt, it’s going to move a lot more than a 17 kilo steel frame.
But how recyclable is the new product compared to its constituents?
And equally important what usually happened to the ‘waste’ from these farms – if you were just dumping it for nature, so letting the insects etc at it it could be a rather important part of the local ecology.
However I do like the idea of fibre reinforced plastics that are less energy intensive to produce, especially if they are going into products that will last a very long time so the resources consumed in creation really don’t matter so much. So it might be a good choice here as cars aught to last, but I’m not entirely convinced.
Green washing. It´s at least 15 years that car manufacturers use plant fibers to reinforce plastic composites. Hemp , flax …. why not olive cuttings.
Nothing new. Call me when the plastics they use is plant based.
So taking a perfectly recyclable wood and turn it to plastic bullshit? Brillant…
Can you cite a “recyclable” use of olive prunings? Since the article is about “pruning” not solid wood.
Thing is, wood isn’t honestly “recyclable”. You can chop it down to smaller and smaller pieces, ultimately into fibers, and then those fibers can be recovered and re-used but every time you do that you get shorter and weaker fibers until they no longer work for the things you’re trying to make.
That’s called “downcycling”. People call downcycling recycling to give a better impression, but most of the time you don’t actually get much more use out of the thing. The degraded materials can only rarely be used alone and new materials must be added to maintain product quality, and after one or two rounds it’s still going in the landfill as waste.
And the criticism against downcycling is that it’s basically smoke and mirrors when the real goal is fully circular economy. You can cut down on the raw material use by re-using what you have, but it will never completely eliminate the disposable economy – it only reduces its size.
So it’s pointless to pretend you’re being sustainable by stretching your penny to the point that it only looks like you are. Humanity is going to grow, and more of the people will want higher living standards and all the things richer people have, so sooner or later you’re back where you started: over-use of available resources.
The good point about wood is that it grows on trees and other tree-like plants, so unlike other materials that come from the ground it is actually sustainable as long as you’re not using too much, so downcycling will work and help you with some caveats: land and energy use.
Recycling takes energy, and so far as you don’t have a sustainable energy source to do it, at the required scale, you’re just switching one problem for another. Wood is an energy source itself, so there’s a tipping point where trying to downcycle wood one more time will be less useful than simply burning it for power. That is, putting your paper cup into the “burnable waste” bin instead of the “recyclable waste” bin may be the smarter option, especially when the paper cup in question contains plastic coatings and fillers that are difficult to remove.
Land use is a whole different can of worms, since humanity is already using over 40% of arable land globally for growing stuff. That’s why biofuels aren’t as scalable as many people would think. Destruction of ecosystems is a massive problem, since it leads to loss of biodiversity, which means a poverty of different species and ultimately turns up as loss of arable land when fertile soil isn’t renewed – you just get simple weeds. The option you’re left with is fertilizing with fossil stuff – non-renewable minerals you dig up from the ground and nitrogen fertilizers you create using gargantuan amounts of energy.
Substituting other materials with wood on a massive scale is going to cause ecological issues, and it was already becoming a problem in places 200 years ago when humanity was only a fraction of the size, but we skipped over that by having the industrial revolution and figuring out how to use steel, concrete, and plastics instead.
I really hope that the local wildlife doesn’t find this as delicious as Pine Martens find some Volkswagen wiring looms… supposedly the insulation is made with some bio-degradeable stuff.
Chap at my work discovered rats had eaten the engine wiring loom of his Golf GTI over a weekend.
What it currently used to make these car parts? Is this filler made from olive prunings better or worse than the current state of the art? Yes, plant fibre fillers are nothing new (as in the Trabant mentioned earlier) but we don’t need to get into a “greenwashing vs nirvana fallacy” argument, we just need to know if we are making an incremental improvement.
Of course, the best option for a citizen who wants to “make a difference” is to simply not buy a new car! It’s not sexy or exciting but it’s usually cheaper :-)