THE ULTIMATE GREEN CAR MADE FROM SUGAR BEETS AND FLAX

A new student project in the Netherlands has yielded a car that is intentionally biodegradable – made from sugar beets and flax!

The car, named Lina, has a body shell created by the TU/Economic Team at the Eindhoven University of Technology from resin processed from sugar beets covered with woven flax. The resulting material is said to be as strong as fibreglass. For body stiffness and structure, the body panels contain a honeycomb structure that is placed between two sheets of flax composite. 

The chassis itself is made from aluminium with a MacPherson strut front suspension and trailing arm rear suspension, with disc brakes front and back. 

This ultimately green car is electric and features two motors drawing juice from three separate lithium-ion batteries with a maximum range of 62 miles when fully charged. The very light weight of Lina (only 683 pounds) makes it more efficient than the Nissan Leaf – even though it doesn't have the range of Nissan's EV hatch.

Seating four passengers, the Lina is meant to demonstrate the use of biodegradable materials that could be used in cars in the future – when the lifespan of batteries might make cheap electric cars more disposable than internal combustion cars (if not necessarily recyclable). Biodegradable materials may also offer an alternative to other lightweight components that require a lot of production energy to make.

"Car manufacturers opt for lightweight materials such as aluminium or carbon fibre to create lighter, more efficient cars," the student teams says. "Processing of these materials, however, requires five to six times more energy than steel, the material which they replace. Consequently, the energy that is saved while driving the car is now spent during the production phase. In addition, recyclability of these lightweight materials is lacking significantly compared to steel."

To raise awareness of biodegradable materials in cars, the Lina has been touring the Netherlands – an approach that most automakers have yet into car manufacturing on a meaningful level. If anything, the trend has been moving away from easily recyclable materials as automakers opt for a greater variety of plastics and more complex parts that can't easily be taken apart and recycled. 

Now, the days of cars being made mostly of steel are long gone. The mixes of different metals and materials currently being used greatly complicated recycling operations that reprocess and reuse these materials. This, in turn, encourages new mining rather than actual recycling of materials.