Don't recycle water bottles, eat them instead

  • 01 Apr 2014

Plastic bottle waste is a major international issue, in 2008 alone EU members, together with Norway and Switzerland, sent an estimated 12.1 million tonnes of plastic waste to landfill according to a report by the European Commission.

We could start reducing our usage and recycling more water bottles -- or we could just start eating them. That's the idea behind Skipping Rocks Lab's Ooho, an edible gel that can be used to encase water via a process called spherification.

The technique is borrowed from the culinary industry where was first used to make tiny fake caviar in the 1950s, but to be useful for water transportation, the spheres needed to be somewhat larger. "That's the main innovation of Ooho," explains Rodrigo García González, who designed the gel alongside fellow design students Pierre Paslier and Guillaume Couche. "We do this process with the water frozen and we do it with a double membrane." This allows as much as one litre of water to be contained in an Ooho bubble, with the double membrane preventing taste contamination of the water itself. The two layers also allow an Ooho capsule to be labelled by placing something in between the membranes.

The gel itself is made from a mixture of brown algae and calcium chloride, but you don't actually have to eat it. "You can just throw it away," González told, "it's entirely biodegradable."

While the Ooho spheres may look fragile, according to González, the strength of the membrane is "similar to the skin of a fruit" and it can be made thicker or thinner to suit. "I've made some so thick that you can even bounce them," he says.

The designers are still figuring out their plans for Ooho with the fact that the capsules aren't resealable being a major issue.

There are also chemical challenges in making Ooho even more resistant if it's to be mass manufactured and used to deliver food products to the market. But González also points out one of one of Ooho's biggest strengths. "It's is very easy to make, that's one of the things we're trying to push forward. The project is licensed under Creative Commons so it's possible for everyone to do it at home. It's just like making a recipe"