The idea came to them over a beer in their student dorm. Thomas Rojas Sonderegger, a civil engineering student at the time, was telling architecture student Marlene Stechl about a lecture he had attended about a Colombian who was using banana fibers to make building materials. "We thought it would be great if we could produce our own local building material. That would save greenhouse gas emissions," says Marlene Stechl. "We thought about what solution could work in Bavaria. We were actually joking when we said: It would be cool to use hops. The next day we actually started researching.
