Cugel wrote: ↑17 Nov 2022, 6:03pm
Sadly I remain ignorant of the environmental impacts and costs of many things, including carbon fibre & resin constructions. The stuff seems very stable, though, which it needs to be for bike frames and other engineered components coming under huge stresses and strains, so presumably it could be stored easily when done with, without leaching bad stuff into the environment .... ? (That's a guess). But could it be processed for reuse?
Hopefully there'll be an engineer somewhere who can inform us all.
Cugel
Well, BMW is into carbon fibres and use it to reinforce plastics. I don't really like modern BMW cars (they did make some peachy ones in the 60s) but they do understand how to extract more money and more brand loyalty than any other manufacturer. It turns out, their engineers are still first rate at pure engineering as the little i3 shows.
The i3 is perhaps the only car for several decades on which I'd be prepared to waste significant amounts of money, that's to say, buy it whilst there are still £thousands to lose in 'depreciation'. It's an exquisitive piece of engineering, Sandy Munro who takes apart new motor cars and reveals their inner secrets to other manufacturers for a living, was so intrigued that he paid for one himself and took it apart. This video is an interesting watch even if you're not an engineer, or are interested in engineering.
Apparently BMW has largely sorted the recycling aspect of the carbon fibre based shell, here's a link with respect to its production footprint.
And here's a link to its recycling, https://www.autoevolution.com/news/recy ... 95296.html