Blog Entry 1 Multimedia Capstone January Term

In today's times, our nation is moving to make our community green. The way we are making this motion is by going paper free in schools, making products out of recycled materials, and making hybrid vehicles which run off electricity. The one place we should all have our cross hairs on is the automotive industry because they are the leading factor to the green house effect and pollution in our nation. If we really want to make this nation environmentally friendly then we should make some important changes in our automotive industry. I feel the biggest and one of the most vital changes would be to replace the polymer composites that are used as the main material when making the body and panels of cars and trucks. These composites are non renewable and non biodegradable, therefore meaning they will not break down into the soil when the life of these composites have reached it's end. What we can use to replace these composites like fiber glass and carbon fiber would be using plant fiber reinforced composites. Plant fiber reinforced composites are made out of cellulose based plant stalks like hemp, flax, etc. Along with these fibers, we could use coconut oil or corn oil to replace the polymer resin as the adhesive to hold the fibers together. Making this change would result in making the composites 100% biodegradable and renewable. With this change being environmentally friendly, this new material will be cheaper to produce and will be just as strong if not stronger that the polymer composites. Making this change would greatly reduce the amount of waste that goes into land fills and non renewable waste from vehicles. Also making this change could also result in the movement of using this new material in several other objects that use plastics. If this were to happen, everything could very likely become biodegradable and completely environmentally green.
I decided to target this issue because I am majoring in Mechanical Engineering and I have a undying passion for cars and making them faster, and along with this, making cars more green and thought a major issue in our community is making vehicles environmentally friendly.