Did you know that animals on factory farms produce 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population? Such conditions are common place in the dairy, meat, and leather industry. They require animals to be sequestered in small areas, making it unhygienic for them as well as the consumers. According to PETA, turning skin into leather requires massive amounts of energy and dangerous chemicals, including mineral salts, formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives, and various oils, dyes, and finishes, some of them cyanide-based. Most leather produced in the U.S. is chrome-tanned, and all wastes containing chromium are considered hazardous by the EPA. As a cruelty-free alternative, Fruitleather Rotterdam has come up with mango peel faux-leather, which interestingly also tackles food waste.
Leather in a few days
Koen Meerkerk and Hugo de Boon are a Rotterdam based designer duo, who graduated from the Willem de Kooning academy in Rotterdam with a bachelor degree in spatial design. They share a zeal to attach value to things that would otherwise be labelled useless. The duo has turned their passion into a circular economy, procuring waste mangoes from companies that are required to discard the fruits for quality control-totally free of cost- to process them into fruit leather. It involves grinding the mangoes to a coarse paste, pouring in certain additives to give it leather-like feel, drying it on racks and finally applying multiple layers of ‘waterproofing wax’ over a course of days.
Collaborating and creating
The company solely focuses on the production of Fruitleather material at present. Designers and brands can procure it through the Fruitleather Rotterdam website and utilise it to create any product they wish to make. Although the leather sheets lose their waterproofing from the edges when going through cuts and stitches, makers can apply proper natural wax to keep it durable, or buy Fruitleather Rotterdam’s own wax to do the job. “We do not directly make/sell products but rather collaborate with sustainable designers,” the duo informs. Willingness to face and solve environmental problems from a designer point of view, with the courage and energy of entrepreneurs has been their driving force. They have based the production facility in Bluecity, where they work together with other circular businesses towards a zero waste economy.
The idea of using mangoes for leather did not occur to them at random, but rather after months of thought and research- as mangoes have a lot of fiber, and Netherlands happened to import or trade more than half of the mangoes in Europe, it worked out as the ideal fruit. The vision at Fruitleather Rotterdam is not only to spread awareness of the food waste issue, but also to show how waste in general can be used in a positive way.
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