The new Audi A3 is on the mode, and the Four Rings' latest teaser touts that the model'due south upholstery and carpet use recycled plastic bottles. Each automobile repurposes the equivalent amount of material that would go into over 100 bottles. The company promises that the resulting fabric has the same quality equally a traditional fabric.

This Is It!

Audi volition offering the recycled upholstery in a variety of colors. There's Torsion steel gray with yellow contrasting stitching and Puls two-tone black and silvery with Rock Greyness stitching. Later, the company intends to add a pick that's black and reddish.

Gallery: Audi A3 Interior Teaser

The latest spy shots (below) bear witness the side by side-gen A3 with practically no camouflage, and the design doesn't change too much. There are narrower headlights and a broader grille. At the back, the D-pillar has a steeper angle, which creates a sleeker silhouette for the hatchback.

Gallery: Audi A3 Revealing Spy Photos

The debut for the A3 is very soon, and rumors put the date at March iii. This means the new model would exist on display at the Geneva Motor Bear witness. Wait for sales in Europe to offset before the stop of the year. It'due south not clear when the company would innovate the model to the United States.

There will still be a sedan variant of the A3. It's not clear whether it would debut at the aforementioned time as the hatchback or if the automaker intends to stagger the unveilings. We suspect the latter.

Audi is hardly lone in finding a use for recycled plastic bottles in its vehicles. For example, Ford has been doing this for over two decades, starting with the Mondeo, and has gotten to the point where the company can recycle 1.2 billion bottles a year.

Source: Audi

Chris Bruce

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From bottle to material: Seat upholstery made of PET

  New Audi A3 with sustainable interior concept
  Up to 45 PET bottles with a chapters of 1.5 liters used per seating system
  Many additional components made from secondary raw materials

Ingolstadt, Feb 25, 2020 – The fashion industry produces jewelry, wearing apparel and bags from PET bottles. In add-on, more and more furniture is being fabricated from waste material fabric such as paper shreds, plastic bottles and wood chippings. Audi is at present offering seat upholstery made from recycled material for the new A3 for the kickoff time.

Sustainability is a central pillar in the Audi corporate strategy. This applies to engineering science as well as to the production processes. Seat upholstery made from secondary raw materials are beingness used for the get-go time in the 4th generation of the Audi A3. Up to 89% of the cloth used consists of recycled PET bottles, which are transformed into yarn in an elaborate procedure. This results in fabrics that guarantee the same quality standards in terms of expect and feel as conventional material upholstery.

Turning the old into the new

The bottle disappears in the pigsty of the opposite vending machine, and the customer in Germany gets €0.25. But what happens then? While still in the store, the disposable bottles are compressed for truck ship in order to save space. Once they accept arrived at the recycling constitute, they are sorted past color, size and quality. Strange matter such every bit the caps are separated. A mill and then crushes the bottles into flakes, which are done, dried and melted down. Nozzles shape continuous plastic strands out of the mass. Once they have dried, a machine chops them into small pieces. This results in comminute, otherwise known as recyclate, and this undergoes extrusion to create threads. Wound onto coils, these are used in the last stage to industry materials.

The equipment, data and prices specified in this document refer to the model range offered in Frg. Subject to change without detect; errors and omissions excepted.

More than 100 PET bottles in a single A3

All in all, up to 45 PET bottles with a chapters of ane.5 liters are used per seating system. On tiptop of this, an boosted 62 PET bottles were recycled for the carpeting in the new Audi A3. Other components in the interior are also increasingly made of secondary raw materials, due east.chiliad. insulating materials and absorbers, the side panel trims of the luggage compartment, the loading floor and the mats. The goal is clear: The per centum of recycled textile in the Audi fleet is to rise considerably in the coming years. In the process, the premium brand volition go on to offer its customers products with the high level of quality that they are used to.

At present, the seat upholstery is not yet made completely of recyclable material. "The lower layer of woven material, which is connected to the upper textile with agglutinative, is what poses the claiming. Nosotros are working on replacing this with recyclable polyester," says Ute Grönheim, who is in charge of material evolution in the textiles sectionalization at Audi. "Information technology is our goal to make the seat upholstery completely from unmixed material so that it tin can exist recycled again. Nosotros are no longer very far away from this." In the long term, all seat upholstery beyond all model series volition be fabricated of recycled fabric.

Three recycled covers on offer

There are 3 dissimilar material designs for the Audi A3; they have an up to 89% share of recycled material. One of these is the steel grey fabric "Torsion" for the blueprint selection on which yellow contrasting stitching creates visual highlights. In addition, the textile "Puls" is available. In the South line, it features the black and silver color combination and is accentuated by rock gray contrasting stitching. Later on on, it follows in black and cerise with contrasting stitching. In the equipment line in question, these designs form the basic offer and can exist combined with side bolsters made of bogus leather.

A video showing the production process of PET fabric will be available at Audi MediaTV soon. – Finish –