BMW Goes Even Greener at Annual Climate Week Gathering in New York City
“Circularity” is the way of the future at the brand with the spinning propeller logo.By Mark VaughnPublished: Sep 25, 2025 10:41 AM EDT
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- BMW hosted the North American preview of its Neue Klasse iX3 in New York as part of the annual Climate Week gathering in the city.
- The company discussed the increased use of “circualrity” in its manufacturing and materials sourcing procedures.
- The aim is to reduce CO2 emissions by 40% per vehicle across the entire value chain compared to what they were in 2019.
In New York last week, there were two distinctly different takes on climate change and the need to do something about it.
At the UN on the city’s East Side, US president Donald Trump was addressing the United Nations General Assembly claiming climate change was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
At the annual Climate Week gathering held all across the city were more than 1,000 events—presentations, panel discussions, film festivals, and demonstrations—hosted by environmental nonprofits, companies, and philanthropists all hoping to protect the planet.BMW
Influencers
BMW was among the latter, presenting its ideas about making the car industry cleaner, greener, and ultimately more profitable at the same time. The BMW Group says it has a clear strategy for decarbonization: by 2030, it wants to reduce CO2 emissions by 40% per vehicle across the entire value chain compared to 2019.
As electric drivetrains increase, the focus of CO2 emissions is shifting, more specifically, toward the supply chain. BMW already offers 25 fully electric models across 12 model series. By 2030, one in two new cars made by BMW Group will have a fully electric drivetrain. That increases the need for clean production of clean cars.
“Circularity” is the word BMW kept repeating. It’s sort of like recycling but somehow more complete, less wasteful.
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“If you look at how business or how industry has worked over the last years, decades, or even centuries, I think you will determine that industry has always been very linear,” said Glenn Schmidt, vice president of sustainability strategy at BMW. “We were extracting resources. We’re using the resources to build some sort of a product, we’re using the product, and then we’re disposing of it right at the end of that. It’s just landfill. Maybe it ends up somewhere else, in landfills, garbage, or it’s in the oceans…”
Here’s where circularity differs from recycling.
“You are, yes, extracting material, you’re using it, you’re converting it into a product, and then at the end of it, ideally, you’re reusing as well.”
Maybe that’s not all that different.
“I don’t want to get too poetic here, but if you think about it, that’s really how nature works, right? Things are always in a closed loop. Things always get recycled. Things always get reused. And I think there’s a there’s a lot of potential in this concept. And this is something that we’re fundamentally convinced about within the BMW Group.”
“Things are always in a closed loop. Things always get recycled.”
BMW is committed to circularity, and to the Paris climate agreement, which, among other things, aims to reduce CO2 while reducing the resources necessary to build cars.
If you’re a carmaker using secondary, recycled material, that’s cheaper, right? Yes, eventually, but apparently not at first.
“Like any innovation, you’re having to invest up front. But there’s a business case behind that as well.”
One cost is the way cars will be made and sourcing the material to make them.
“Cars have to be made differently,” Schmidt said.BMW
Another influencer. The dress was orange, as in the phone.
Consider the iX3, the first of BMW’s Neue Klasse vehicles.
“We had a look at the recycling and the demands in the recycling process, and when we started to develop the car we already had these principles in mind,” said Nils Hesse, vice president of product sustainability.
For instance, the wheels on the iX3 are made from 70% recycled aluminum. The same content percentage can be used even in highly stressed parts, Hesse said. Keeping parts made from solely one element is likewise important to circularity.
“At the end of (the vehicle’s) life, if you mix different types of materials, you have to separate them at the end. And if you have to separate them, it’s not profitable to recycle them. So that’s what we’re working on.”
Fully one third of the iX3 is made up of recycled materials. And that number will only go up, BMW says.
Fully one third of the iX3 is made up of recycled materials.
BMW is also looking to reduce CO2 emissions during production.
“If you especially look at the battery electric vehicle, you have to look at the whole lifecycle emissions, it’s very important to reduce the footprints during the production and in the supply chain,” Hesse said. “The battery cells are about 50% of the CO2 (emitted during production), they are responsible for 50% of the CO2 emissions in the iX3. And then you have steel and aluminum and thermoplastics, and these four material groups are responsible for 90% of the CO2 released in the supply chain and in production.”
While on the road, EVs emit no CO2 at the tailpipe; during the production process, gasoline cars produce less CO2 than EVs. BMW says it will essentially break even on CO2 emissions with the iX3’s production cycle within one year.
“After approximately one year, the combustion-engine car and the iX3 will be on the same level,” Hesse said. “I think that’s very impressive, because we started at the beginning of the development, before we take these measures, was like 16,000 kilometers (10,000 miles). And on top, it has big batteries. So we’re not comparing a small-battery car. It (the iX3) has a 108-kWh battery capacity. So that’s really quite impressive.”
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Further progress will require cooperation with other carmakers.
“If we say we want to carbon-reduce steel or whatever, we’re not that big a player that the steel companies would change and cost a lot of money to change the process,” said Schmidt. “So this is also the long run. The transformation will take a couple of years until we get the materials we need.”
An example of circularity in car manufacturing would be to recycle a plastic bumper directly into another bumper.
“A bumper shouldn’t be (turned into) a plastic bottle at the end, we should use it again as a high quality material in the car,” said Hesse.
BMW had a display of the four stages of recovering a dismantled bumper, grinding it up, and making it into a new one. The hardest part, Hesse said later, is getting the paint off. But they can do that.
“Another way of thinking about electric vehicles is they’re sort of like mines, with precious material and resources inside of it,” said Schmidt. “You have lithium, you have a cobalt, you have nickel as well.”
“And I think, as an EV user, you can say, ‘Well, wait a second, not only am I driving a vehicle that’s fun to drive, that’s exhilarating, that will depreciate, but at the end of the day, I have a lot of interesting geo-strategic material in my car, and there will be a lot of interested parties wanting to purchase my vehicle in the future so that we can have those loops.’”
Everybody wins!
But not everyone agrees on the need to do these things. Again, just down the block, president Trump continued his own speech.
“Climate change no matter what happens… if you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
So which is the best approach to the future of carmaking? Let us know in the comments section below.
Mark Vaughn grew up in a Ford family and spent many hours holding a trouble light over a straight-six miraculously fed by a single-barrel carburetor while his father cursed the Blue Oval, all its products and everyone who ever worked there. This was his introduction to objective automotive criticism. He started writing for City News Service in Los Angeles, then moved to Europe and became editor of a car magazine called, creatively, Auto. He decided Auto should cover Formula 1, sports prototypes and touring cars—no one stopped him! From there he interviewed with Autoweek at the 1989 Frankfurt motor show and has been with us ever since.
