Designers of studio Skipping Rocks Lab have created an edible water ‘bottle’ using a technique called spherification. This technique originates from the 1940s and has been reintroduced in 2003 by El Bulli chef Ferran Adria. To create the water bottles or Ooho’s as they have been named, water is frozen and the ice is placed into a solution containing calcium chloride and brown algae. When the ice meets the solution a thin, flexible and edible skin is created. The skin consists of a double membrane, which makes it possible to dispose of the (less hygienic) outer membrane before consuming the Ooho. The inner membrane can be consumed together with the water or be thrown away ‘sustainably’: the membrane is biodegradable. Ooho’s are easy and cheap to create, you can even make them in your own kitchen. To provide the Ooho to as many people as possible the team is planning to make the recipe open source. Next to the environmental impact also the financial impact is promising. Producing an Ooho is cheaper than producing a conventional water bottle: the producers claim that the costs are 2 versus 10 cents. At the moment the team works on improving the user friendliness of the design. If a feature like a lid would be added (it is not yet possible to close an opened Ooho) and Ooho’s could be consumed more efficiently, the days of old fashioned water bottles might be counted. More info and a movie here.
brightbuilding 