peebee.

Natural resources have always been used to create new materials. We have approached nature to transform it into something we can use in our everyday lifes. But we're missing the final steps of a product which is its disposal and the waste it creates. Some materials are not biodegradable and take a great effort and time to decompose. We can approach this subject differently and create materials that can complete their lifecycle by going back to nature in a non invasive way.

In order to find natural ingredients that are usually discarded we started by approaching local businesses that could have outputs they don't longer make use of that we can transform. One of the materials gathered was beer spent grains. Beer spent grains are high in fiber and protein. We saw an opportunity to collaborate with breweries around Barcelona to try and create a new material out of this waste. Beer Spent grains can be used as food for cattle, biomass, compost, to grow mushrooms, for cosmetics, construction and many other applications.

After researching on the properties of the ingredient we decided to test the applications to get closer to understanding this material. We created recycled paper with the beer spent grains and started testing different recipes to see its resistance, flexibility, durability and possible uses. We came up with different samples we were able to analyze and see which process suited us better to create paper. We tried with wet grains, dry grains, wet grains and paper, dry grains and paper, sifting and without.