Soon it will also be possible to buy organic and regionally  in the automotive industry. At least that's what will happen if the researchers at the Fraunhofer IFAM and their project partners from Germany and Brazil have their way. In the CLIENT II project BestBioPLA, they are jointly developing natural fibre-reinforced plastics that are bio-based and biodegradable. A further project objective is to consider mainly raw materials that can be obtained from regionally available resources.

Dr. Katharina Haag, group leader for material-specific manufacturing concepts at the Fraunhofer IFAM and head of the research consortium: "We have reached a decisive milestone in the development of the materials and are now sending the first material samples to Prof. Renate Wellen, coordinator of the project on the side of our Brazilian partners, who will analyse how they degrade". At the same time, the German partners will further optimise the processing conditions and test the limits of the new bio-based material, so that by the end of the project they will have a concept for the material's processing in automotive engineering available.