Apples into leather
Today there's a need for alternative materials. Producers overlook waste management affecting consumer wellbeing. By upcycling resource streams into a sensuous tactile user experience, The Apple Girl helps you tell a unique story through our technical innovation in a circular economy context.
MISSION
Solving the leather problem with food waste. We are committed to producing quality textile made in sustainable processes. Core to our culture is daring to think differently about complex problems we face as a society. An apple might be a strange thing to think about as a base material for the next innovation in high performance leather. But it’s all that’s on our mind at The Apple Girl. The future of materials is in using food waste!
VISION
UPCYCLING
We're inspired by nature and how it strengthens, binds, is flexible and durable. We’re in love with experimenting and learning from strategies used by living things, with the intention of creating a 100% biodegradable material comparable to conventional animal leather. Today there is a need for alternative materials. Material producers overlook waste management and use harmful ingredients, thereby affecting:
- Agriculture
- Livestock, &
- Consumer well-being
The global meat and leather industry emissions of CO2 have increased by almost 50% since 1990. Formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives and cyanide-based dyes are used in the tanning process. Production for 1 kilo of animal leather uses 16,000 litres of water. Health and sustainability concerns are warranted.
We aim to address these issues by upcycling in a circular economy context the tons of pulp waste accumulated in pressing apples for cider and juice. At The Apple Girl we only use approximately 1 liter of water to produce 1 meter of Apple Leather and all ingredients are safe and biodegradable. We use waste to make a higher value product users gain an upgraded material experience with: Apple Leather.
MATERIAL QUALITIES
We create a living, breathing product. Safe in your hands and the soil. We turn apples into leather! The material can be thick or thin, is resistant to mold, has a unique sensuous tactility and is soft, and you can sew and color it.
Apple Leather is 100% biodegradable-in-nature “leather.” It can be both rigid or highly flexible with an enchanting handle and unique story. It's vegan, and you can laser cut in it. We apply tech-driven research with cross-disciplinary collaborations to craft the highest performing Apple Leather with sensuous aesthetics. Our storytelling of pulp waste transformed into products enables conscious consumers to display their values and make a statement buying our sustainable innovation.
VALUES
We value biomimicry-thinking in a material-driven design context: looking to nature to solve design problems. We aim to mimic processes that nature has perfected. Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute tell us the pillars of Biomimicry:
- Nature as model. Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf.
- Nature as measure. Biomimicry uses an ecological standard to judge the “rightness” of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: What works. What is appropriate. What lasts.
- Nature as mentor. Biomimicry is a way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it.
