Imagine going to the store, picking up some fresh fruits, and then carrying them away in a bag made from leftovers of those very same fruits.

How about then heading home to eat a bowl of fruit salad, whilst sitting on a chair made from its discarded counterparts? 

Thanks to an innovative group of Rotterdam based designers, this could soon be entirely possible.

After discovering that around 3500 kg of fruit and vegetables are thrown away in Rotterdam markets every day, the collective of designers studying at Willem de Kooning Academie wanted to do something about it. So they started collecting the discarded fruits, and gave them new life by recycling them into durable fruitleather.

The fruits are mashed, cooked and then dried to produce the leathery material. They've so far demonstrated its use for bags, chairs and artworks, but suggest many more products are possible.

The team are still perfecting the manufacturing process to maximise the leather for commercial use, but we're excited to see what they come up with!

They have dubbed the project Fruitleather Rotterdam, and we applaud the innovative thinking they have applied to the very real problem that we have the world over: how to turn food waste into a environmentally-friendly, useful and economical product. 

We have a feeling we'll be hearing a lot more about this type of bold thinking in the future...

To read more about them, go to Fruitleather Rotterdam