Now you can accessorize with cruelty-free "leather" created from discarded fruit, thanks to Fruitleather Rotterdam.
A video they posted on Facebook shows their final products and some (but no all) of their process.
In a single day on one of the outdoor markets in and around Rotterdam, vendors daily throw away approximately 3500 kilos of rotten or other unsellable fruits and vegetables. They see the foods as trash and bin them. But food isn't trash, you just need to find a different purpose for the resisting material. We used our design background to come up with a solution. A solution that we found in gastronomy. Chefs use different techniques to create wonderful flavor experiences with fruits and vegetables using them to garnish their plates. One of those techniques is to mash, cook and then dry fruits to make them into a candy like piece of fruit called fruitleather. By producing this on large scale with the unsellable fruits from the market, a new kind of material is created. This material can be used in many different ways, creating many different products. We ourselves have created a design bag made completely out of the fruitleather material. The bag shows the quality and possibilities that fruitleather has to offer as a material.
It turns out that different fruits make different grades of leather.
