Oranges have their own natural, durable packaging which safely houses the sweet and juicy flesh within. Extracting the juice produces a lot of orange peels, a fact that inspired one design student to explore ways using those discarded skins to create a juice carton.

“Initially I had the idea that you could use all the waste produced making a liter of orange juice to create the carton,” said Denny Handley, a product design student at Brunel University, London. “But the material itself steadily degrades in water, so I looked for other applications for it.” Handley dubbed the end result “Bio-Peel.”

So while creating a juice carton didn’t work out as planned, Handley found that orange peels, when mixed with other biodegradable materials, including vegetable glycerin (itself an industrial byproduct) and water, could be molded, baked and then dried to form a hardened substance.