— By Andru Shively — 

Drink it on down and drive it through town. With its new Grande Panda hybrid model, Italian automobile manufacturer Fiat has launched a reported industry-first vehicle incorporating material from recycled beverage cartons, namely their protective ultrathin polymer-aluminium (polyAl) composite layer needed to maintain a drink’s freshness.

With composite cartons provided by Switzerland’s TetraPak and a polyAl-based compound produced by Italy’s Lapo Compound, each Grande Panda reportedly uses recycled material from the equivalent of 140 cartons, incorporated into interior components including the dashboard, control panel, and door panels.

Related: Driven to the bottom of the (plastic) bottle

Marketed under the tagline “Life is Pandastic”, Fiat went so far as to recruit musical artist Shaggy to record a new version of his hit 1995 single “Boombastic” for the vehicle’s launch, coinciding with the song’s 30th anniversary.

The music video for the parenthetically fantastic redux “Boombastic (Fantastic)” is little more than a three-minute-long commercial for the new car and features Mr. Boombastic driving the Grande Panda alongside un petit panda – the animal, that is – to as far-flung pandastic locales as the moon.

While we at Plastic (Fantastic) applaud the rhyme scheme behind the wheel here, we think the recycled-material aspect of the new model is eclipsed in this campaign. Might we alternatively suggest the commercialisation of another classic, Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty”, whose title would also only require a small tweak.