SALIENT FACTS: BIODEGRADABLE CARS

Last month, the United States rejected the Kyoto Protocol, which seeks to
limit global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, because,
according to President Bush, it would hurt American industry. But American
car makers, copying the methods of their European counterparts, have begun
to replace fiberglass with natural plant fibers anyway. Using such fibers
can save much of the energy needed to make a car and result in parts that
are 40 percent lighter -- and biodegradable. By 2010, the New Jersey
consulting firm Kline & Company expects natural fibers to replace a fifth
of the fiberglass in today's automobile interiors.

WHAT'S THAT SMELL? In North America, plant stalks replaced 2 percent of the
fiberglass in mats, seat backs and other plastic composites last year; hemp
dominated this field. The crop is at least 65 cents cheaper per pound than
fiberglass; it also grows perennially and can be recycled easily. In
breadbasket states, lawmakers are examining industrial hemp production as a
way of boosting farm income. Too bad it's a controlled substance. The
Illinois legislature approved financing for a study earlier this year
(though the governor vetoed it), and the Nebraska legislature is debating
legalization.

WHAT'S THE HARM? One problem, but a big one: even though the stalks have
negligible narcotic effects, the Drug Enforcement Agency almost always
views growing industrial hemp -- cannabis, after all -- as tantamount to
growing weed. Susie Dugan, the executive director of the antidrug group
Pride Omaha, insists that industrial hemp licenses would give cover to pot
peddlers and that drug-prevention activists would have to warn others about
the hemp car's drug-promoting message.

WHAT ELSE IS GROWING? It is the use of natural fibers in car doors and
trunks that would constitute the real engineering triumph -- and car makers
are getting there. A company called Indiana Bio-Composites will make a
recyclable exterior panel for a mobile home from kenaf, a cordlike
hibiscus, in the next two years. Nick Tucker, a University of Warwick
researcher, is working to convert a nine-foot-tall crop known as elephant
grass into a tough material fit for biodegradable car bodies by 2006. If
the plants fail, all is not lost on the reduced-emissions front. G.M., in
partnership with Hormel, recently brewed up GMBond, a nontoxic mold for
casting metals, from "turkey and pork byproducts."