Researchers create an edible alternative to plastic bottles

Thursday, October 22, 2015, 6:47 PM - Plastic bottles take hundreds of years to decompose, yet every year almost 40 billion bottles lay ashore, drift at sea, or sit in landfill sites, beginning the centuries-long process of decomposition.

The journey isn't seamless, either. One million sea birds and an array of marine wildlife die every year due to starvation, choking, and intestinal blockage -- all the result of plastic pollution.

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The impact of plastic bottles prompted one student-based start-up to think of a solution.

Cue Ooho! The edible water bottle.

Crafted by three students at Imperial College London, the "jelly-fish like," tasteless bottle is both biodegradable and consumable -- an unconventional approach to eliminating plastic pollution.

Rodrigo García González along with fellow students Pierre Paslier and Guillaume Couche created the bottle using a spherification technique. The bottles are composed of two layers: calcium chloride and a brown-algae extract solution.

The researchers (all members of London's Skipping Rocks Lab,) designed the bottle by dipping a frozen ball of water into a calcium chloride solution, creating the first external gelatinous layer. After, they soaked the ball in a brown-algae extract solution, covering the ice ball in a second layer, securing the shape.

The product required thousands of prototypes and years of testing to perfect the final bottle -- and the process is not quite complete.

The outer membrane is as thick as the skin on a fruit, so transporting the product is much more challenging by comparison to plastic water bottles. The group is also working to make the bottle reusable, while figuring out ways to keep the outer layer sanitary while in transit.

Skipping Rocks Lab recently received a sustainability grant from the European Union, with the intention of bringing the project to a larger audience.

Thumbnail images courtesy of Skipping Rocks Lab and Steven Depolo, Flickr.

SOURCES: NRDC | Independent | EcoWatch | UNESCO