Plastic bottles are some of the most pervasive products on the planet. They’re usually used to hold liquids like water, carbonated drinks, milk, cooking oil, and shampoo.
According to the UN Environmental Programme, we’ve become addicted to using plastic bottles to the point where one million of them are bought per minute around the globe. What’s unfortunate is that the majority of those plastic bottles are designed for single use.
Massive consumption of these products has resulted in a host of environmental problems that are challenging to address. Think carbon dioxide emissions, ocean pollution, landfill spillover, and habitat loss, among others.
Add to those concerns the risks they pose to human health. Clean Water Action cited a study revealing that countless companies selling bottled water are actually just filtering municipal water and marketing it as a safer option. What’s more, they’re likely contaminated with microplastics and chemicals from the bottles holding them.
Microplastics, which are tiny pieces of plastic debris, can easily find their way into the food chain. Exposure to them has been linked to different toxic effects on humans, including:
- Metabolic disorder
- Immune response toxicity
- DNA damage
- Oxidative stress
- Neurotoxicity
- Reproductive and developmental toxicity
It’s not just microplastics we need to worry about. Many plastic bottles are known endocrine disruptors. Plastic #1 or polyethylene terephthalate (PET), in particular, contains phthalates that can leach into your water when exposed to high temperatures. Phthalates have been found to cause abnormalities like endometriosis, premature puberty, asthma, overweight, obesity, and insulin resistance.
Considering all those negativities, any means to avoid using plastic bottles can be helpful in minimizing their impact on the environment and human health. This is where the edible water bottle comes into play.
What’s an Edible Water Bottle?
An edible water bottle is a packaging solution intended to reduce the waste generated by plastic bottles. The concept is to make a container that can be consumed along with its content.
Creating an edible water bottle requires either the spherification or reverse spherification process. Both involve encapsulating water into a gel coating, although the latter works better in making a bigger, thicker sphere that can hold liquid longer.
To consume the water, you can bite off a portion of the membrane and sip it out and then either eat the membrane or throw it away.
The most popular example of an edible water bottle was developed by Skipping Rocks Lab, now called Notpla. “Ooho,” as the product was called, uses a membrane made from calcium chloride and sodium alginate (seaweed). Each sphere holds about 50 milliliters of water.
The Smithsonian Mag featured another water bottle invention that can be consumed–Eco-Hero. Created by Madison Checketts, a student from Eagle Mountain, Utah, Eco-Hero’s coating is a combination of calcium lactate, sodium alginate, xanthan gum, and lemon juice. It can hold up to 200 milliliters of water–4x than Ooho–and can last up to three weeks in the fridge when submerged in lemon water before its coating bursts.
The science behind edible water bottle production is credited to William J. S. Peschardt, an English food scientist who patented spherification in the 1940s. He first proposed the technique to make edible replicas of soft fruits like cherries and other foods.
It wasn’t until 2003 that spherification became popular in the culinary world. Ferran Adrià, then chef of the now defunct Spanish restaurant El Bulli, used the technique to make his avant-garde cuisine.
Applications and Benefits of Edible Water Bottles
Edible water bottles are very useful for events where water and other beverages are often served in single-use plastic bottles. These include festivals, marathons, and other outdoor activities.
These products present multiple benefits that make them a much better option than plastic bottles:
- They are fully consumable and biodegradable, so they don’t create or leave behind any waste.
- They are made from renewable materials and can be produced with minimal carbon footprint.
- They can help reduce plastic pollution by minimizing the need for plastic packaging.
Challenges with Edible Water Bottles
Edible water bottles are the kind of innovation we really need as we’re dealing with climate change. Their no-plastic feature is a big step for us to forego plastic bottles gradually.
On a practical level, though, they present a couple of challenges:
- The coatings themselves are not durable enough and have limited shelf life, making it difficult to store and transport them without breaking.
- An edible water bottle can only hold a small amount of water. This would require consumers to purchase and consume multiple spheres to quench their thirst–a not-so-practical option if you don’t want to carry around blobs of water that can burst at any time.
- Depending on the concentrations of the ingredients, the membrane may end up gummy, which may take some time to get used to how it feels in the mouth. It may also leave an aftertaste that may not be palatable to some. That would require additional ingredients to counter the taste.
Skipping Rocks Lab faced the first two issues with Ooho, which made the company realize that it wasn’t as sustainable as they thought it would be. Selling them at grocery stores would also mean placing them in more durable external packaging, which would contradict their plastic-free concept. This led Skipping Rocks Lab to rebrand itself into Notpla–short for Not Plastic.
Although Ooho didn’t hit the shelves of grocery stores, it’s now adopted by many event organizers as an alternative to plastic bottles. Events like the London Marathon, Gothenburg Half, and more introduce runners to this edible water bottle, helping them hydrate while reducing plastic waste.
Oooho’s star ingredient, seaweed, is now being used by Notpla to make biodegradable coating for takeaway boxes, zero-waste paper, and food oil pipettes. The brand also has other products in its development pipeline, including energy gel pods, dry food sachet, bath oil sachet, and rigid cutlery and packaging.
Meanwhile, Checketts addressed the third issue, particularly the concern about taste, by adding lemon juice into the calcium lactate, sodium alginate, and xanthan gum mix. She noted that this helped make the membrane and water have a slightly lemony taste.
Depending on who would consume the edible water bottle, a bit of flavor in the water could be a hit or miss. Some may find a hint of flavor a welcome addition to their water, while others might find it off-putting.
Addressing the challenges mentioned above can help the edible water bottle be sold and made readily available on a large scale. Also, even if it doesn’t find its way into the markets, we can’t deny that its concept is great and would make a great foundation for other eco-friendly products, just like what Notpla is doing.
Making Your Own Edible Water Bottle
While there’s no commercially available edible water bottle just yet, that doesn’t mean you can’t try and experience it.
You can make a couple at home with ingredients you can purchase online or from grocery stores selling molecular gastronomy ingredients. Here’s what you need and how you can make edible water bottles.
Materials and Ingredients
- Large and small bowls
- Hand mixer
- Round-bottom spoon (size will determine how big or small you want your water bottles)
- 1 gram of sodium alginate
- 5 grams of calcium lactate or calcium gluconate water
Instructions
- In a small bowl, add 1 gram of sodium alginate to a cup of water. Use the hand mixer to ensure the sodium alginate combines well with the water. Allow the mixture to rest for 15 minutes or until it turns into a clear mixture.
- To make the calcium solution, add 5 grams of calcium lactate or calcium gluconate to 4 cups of water in a large bowl. Stir until the calcium lactate or calcium gluconate is dissolved.
- Once your sodium alginate mixture is formed, scoop it with the rounded spoon, gently drop the ball into the calcium lactate solution, and let it sit for a couple of minutes. You will notice that a membrane forms around the ball, which will eventually trap the water. The longer you let the ball sit in the calcium lactate bath, the thicker the coating becomes.
- Repeat the process until you make several water balls. Give them a gentle rinse to remove any residue from the solution before drinking.
Final Thoughts
We’re always impressed with the innovations people are making to help the environment and make sustainable living the norm. The edible water bottle is one of those inventions that we genuinely hope to become mainstream in the near future.
With a few design tweaks–enhanced durability, bigger size, and resealability–and consideration for secondary issues like packaging and transportation, it’s possible for edible water bottles to be sold at scale. When that happens, we may finally be able to address plastic bottle waste altogether.
By then, we can just make edible water bottles at home to spark our curiosity and experience their wonder.
