By Mark Brown, Wired UK

This clean and green microcar runs on something you’d normally just toss away: the aluminum ring pulls that snap off your beer cans.

The all-electric radio controlled vehicle, named “dAlH2Orean”, can zip along at 30km/hr (18 mph) by turning waste aluminum scraps like ring pulls into hydrogen, and then into power. By mixing water and residual aluminum with sodium hydroxide, hydrogen is generated.

That chemical is then passed through a series of filters to eliminate waste and improve performance. A vinegar filter with water helps remove traces of hydroxides, while another filter containing a silica gel ball gets rid of the moisture. A membrane then separates the electrons from the protons until they meet again in an environment of oxygen.

Once produced, the clean hydrogen feeds the fuel cell that produces the energy for the car. Because it’s a closed cycle, the little machine doesn’t belch out any carbon dioxide emissions.

It’s designed by UPC BarcelonaTech professor Xavier Salueña and his student Aleix Llovet for a project called Aluminium. Students have been attempting to make tiny, low-power cars fueled largely by recycled aluminum.

Salueña got the idea (and the name) for the car from the the trash-eating Mr. Fusion reactor on Doc Brown’s DeLorean in Back to the Future. “With this fuel, the car starts and the main characters can jump throughout the time and travel to the future.”

In the inimitable and roughly translated words of the BarcelonaTech team, “The car does not allow time travel, but you can get a top speed of 30 km per hour with a range per charge of 40 minutes.”