Mi Zhou | GIZMODO.cz

Here’s one more reason to love beer! Developed as a 100% environmentally-friendly, animal-friendly and chemically free alternative to leather, BM Leather takes one of the wasted by-products of beer-brewing and turns it into a fabric that mimics faux-leather, but will biodegrade (and even fertilize) when disposed. Designer Mi Zhou developed the material for Stella McCartney in a bid to make fashion much more sustainable, in a way that doesn’t create waste, but rather reduces it.

For every tonne of beer brewed, you’ve got a quarter of a tonne of beer mash, the residual grain/pulp, left behind from the brewing process. Converting this into a fabric, BM Leather uses a by-product in a way that upscales it into a fashion product. Produced in cooperation with Beavertown Brewery, Mi Zhou developed a leather-esque fabric out of the residual wet mash, which comprises mainly mashed grain, husk, sugars, and water. The vegan-friendly leather, developed keeping Stella McCartney’s brand ethos and commitment to animal and eco-friendly fashion, uses zero chemicals, is 100% natural, and can even be dyed in different colors, making it a great new material for fashion designers to toy with, and a lovely push for the fashion industry towards sustainability!

Designer: Mi Zhou for Stella McCartney

Plastic waste is becoming an incredibly insurmountable problem, with cosmetic packaging being one of its largest components. To solve the problem, Mi Zhou designed a solution that gives the packaging more function than just being a disposable outer vessel. “Product packaging has always been thrown away, no matter how well-designed or what material it is made of,” said Zhou. “I want to re-evaluate what packaging could be as well as help us to reduce our plastic footprint.”

Zhou’s solution is Soapack, an innovative series of liquid soap bottles, made from soap themselves. The solid outer bottle holds the liquids inside, and can eventually be used as soap once you’re done with it, leaving you with absolutely zero waste. The bottles are designed to look luxurious and desirable too, relying on soap’s inherent translucency along with beautiful perfume-bottle-inspired forms and a soft pastel color palette.

Bottles for the Soapack are formed by pouring vegetable oil-based soap into a mold. The insides of the bottles are coated with a layer of natural beeswax to prevent the liquid soap from interacting with and dissolving the solid soap bottle. The Soapack bottles can be either placed on cabinets, or even in a soap tray, and used as you go. With its perfume-bottle-inspired forms and a glass-like wall-thickness, Soapack was envisioned to look more appealing than traditional liquid soap and shampoo bottles made from plastic. The object was to create something so beautiful that users bought them and cherished them, eventually opting for a more sustainable lifestyle in the process. The bottles come with soap stoppers too, mimicking antique perfume designs, and are devoid of any label, barring a single tag that hangs from the bottle’s neck… and guess what, that’s made from soap too!

Designer: Mi Zhou