Frustrated with the wasted resources and energy from water bottle manufacturing, Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez fights trash with the innovative Ooho edible water bottle.
The world chooses to spend more than $100 billion dollars each year on water bottles. The average American opts to drink 140 bottles each year. Over 1.5 million barrels of oil are needed just to meet the demand of U.S. water bottle manufacturing. And water bottle waste takes at least 700 years just to decompose. Consumption has been on a ten percent rise each year since 1976. There is no way that this culture of extravagance can continue in the future, especially if Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez and his Ooho edible water bottle can help it.
Gonzalez was an undergraduate architecture student hot on the pursuit of solutions for the plastic bottle epidemic. He and a couple classmates collected bottles and collaborated to build structural components to address symptoms of the issue, however his endeavors with packaging engineers is what launched the Ooho edible water bottle to better tackle the root causes.
The Ooho edible water bottle is inspired from nature’s own concept: the amorphous membrane found in retinas. Or as Gonzalez puts it, “he most clear inspiration is the way nature encapsulate liquids using membranes. Made of lipids and proteins, the membrane enclose, limit and give a shape, keeping the balance between the interior and the exterior.”
He and his team used algae as their base material, which, when combined with calcium and water, creates a gel that mimics the spherification process. The membrane is edible and biodegradeable, which allows the bottle to be discarded or consumed after the water is long gone.
Check out the video above where he presents his ideas and eats a Ooho edible water bottle in the Solve for X talk Ooho! The Edible Water Bottle. He isn’t just presenting his ideas, but also crowdsourcing help from the Solve for X audience to find packing solutions and product improvements.
