Click here to read the Spanish version.
“Can you believe it? My old Aston Martin, which I’ve had for 51 years, runs on surplus English white wine and whey from the cheese process,” Charles III revealed in an interview with the BBC. This self-confessed cheese lover – Camilla Parker-Bowles, the Queen Regent, spoke of her husband’s culinary tastes on MasterChef Australia – decided to modify the operation of his famous blue convertible in 2018 to reduce the carbon footprint. And she did it in a very peculiar way: using leftover cheese and wine.
This fuel, according to The Guardian, is a variable of E85, composed of 85% bioethanol and 15% unleaded gasoline. The bioethanol blend, they remind us, is achieved “using white wine waste not suitable for consumption and whey from cheese-making milk”.
King Charles’ colorful solution to decarbonize his Aston Martin has caused some controversy among experts: “It should not be confused with a serious solution to decarbonize vehicles,” Greg Archer, director of the European Transport and Environment Federation in the United Kingdom, points out to the English newspaper. “On a large scale, biofuels do more harm than good, driving deforestation and land-use change, which worsen the climate crisis,” he explains.
A ‘tasty’ fuel
“It smells delicious as you drive,” says Charles III about his favorite vehicle, the Aston Martin DB6 used by Prince William and Kate Middleton to leave Buckingham Palace on their wedding day. But everything points to the use of the ‘tasty’ fuel remaining a curious anecdote.
As Dr. Chris Malins, an alternative fuels policy and sustainability consultant, has told The Guardian, the King’s case is a “boutique” case that is essentially not scalable as a specific model.
In addition to this ingenuity to decarbonize his Aston Martin, King Charles also makes a personal effort to reduce his own carbon footprint. “I don’t eat meat and fish two days a week and I don’t eat dairy one day a week. If more of this was done, we would reduce the pressure a lot,” he told the BBC.
If you want to know more about the culinary tastes of Charles III and Camilla Parker-Bowles, you can take a look at the ingredients that were – and were not – at their coronation party.
