Some of us have owned cars that were unintentionally biodegradable -- just think of 1970s Fiats that melted after a few years -- but a new student project in the Netherlands has yielded a car that is intentionally biodegradable.

How is such a thing possible?

The body shell of the Lina, as the car is called, was created by the TU/Ecomotive team at the Eindhoven University of Technology from a resin processed from sugar beets covered with woven flax, with the resulting material said to be comparable in strength to fiberglass. For body stiffness and structure, the body panels contain a honeycomb structure that is placed between two sheets of flax composite.

Of course, that's just the body and a number of the interior panels. The chassis itself is made from aluminum with a MacPherson strut front suspension and trailing arm rear suspension, with disc brakes front and back. This truly "green" car is electric and features two motors drawing juice from three separate lithium-ion batteries, with a maximum range of 62 miles on a full charge. The light weight of the Lina -- just 683 pounds -- makes it more efficient than the Nissan Leaf even though it doesn't have the range of Nissan's EV hatch.

The body of the Lina features an internal honeycomb structure for stiffness, made from a bioplastic called PLA which is made out of sugar beets. TU/Ecomotive

With seating for four passengers, the Lina is meant to demonstrate the use of biodegradable materials that could be used in car production at some point in the future, when the lifespans of batteries might make cheap electric cars more disposable than internal combustion cars (if not necessarily recyclable). Biodegradable materials also offer an alternative to other lightweight components that require a lot of production energy to create.

"Car manufacturers opt for lightweight materials such as aluminum or carbon fiber to create lighter, more efficient cars," the student team says. "Processing of these materials, however, requires five to six times more energy than steel, the material which they replace. Consequently, energy that is saved while driving the car is now spent during the production phase. In addition, recyclability of these lightweight materials is lacking significantly compared to steel."

Underneath, the Lina is an electric car with two motors powered by lithium-ion batteries. TU/Ecomotive

Lina has been touring the Netherlands this summer to raise awareness of biodegradable materials in cars, an approach that most automakers have yet to incorporate into car manufacturing on a meaningful level. If anything, the trend has been moving away from easily recyclable materials as automakers opt for a greater variety of plastics and more complex parts that cannot be easily taken apart and recycled.

The days of cars being made mostly from steel are long gone, and the mixes of different metals and materials currently used greatly complicate profitable recycling operations that reprocess and reuse these materials ... which in turn encourages new mining rather than actual recycling of materials.

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