  We consider the category of Deligne 1-motives over a perfect field k of
exponential characteristic p and its derived category for a suitable exact
structure after inverting p. As a first result, we provide a fully faithful
embedding into an etale version of Voevodsky's triangulated category of
geometric motives. Our second main result is that this full embedding "almost"
has a left adjoint, that we call \LAlb. Applied to the motive of a variety we
thus get a bounded complex of 1-motives, that we compute fully for smooth
varieties and partly for singular varieties. As an application we give motivic
proofs of Roitman type theorems (in characteristic 0).
