Edible Water Bottle
It can be tough to get your recommended daily intake of water, but a new innovation is making it easier than ever to keep a bottle—or blob—of H2O on hand.
Created by Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, Guillaume Couche, and Pierre Paslier of Skipping Rocks Lab in London, Ooho is an inexpensive, biodegradable "water bottle" that’s paving the way for the future of hydration.
The orb, which Fast Company notes looks like a silicon implant (or a water balloon) is created by taking a frozen ball of water and then encapsulating it in layers of membrane made of calcium chloride, and then brown algae. The process is a riff on a culinary technique called spherification, which is appropriate since the gelatinous coating is edible. Fruits and vegetables aren’t the only way to eat your water anymore.
Ooho recently received a $22,500 sustainability award from the EU, which means we might be seeing more water blobs in the future. While they might not be ready for tossing in your bag on the way out the door, Ooho does have serious potential when it comes to environmental efforts. In America alone, 50 billion plastic bottles are used annually, and the spherical Ooho packaging could one day bump petroleum-based plastic from store shelves.
If the idea of biting into a water blob weirds you out, don’t worry, it’s not a must. Paslier told the Guardian: "At the end of the day you don’t have to eat it. But the edible part shows how natural it is. People are really enthusiastic about the fact that you can create a material for packaging matter that is so harmless that you can eat it."
So natural in fact, that you can even make them yourself at home—though to be honest, the tap might be easier in that case.
