With more and more cities considering banning plastic water bottles to cut down on plastic waste, plastic water bottles may soon become a thing of the past.
However, there has been much debate about whether they will be replaced with reusable water bottles or, perhaps, transitioned to biodegradable bottles.
According to Dezeen, Ari Jónsson, a design student at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, has created a water bottle that decomposes once it’s empty, and is thus completely biodegradable. If the bottle is full, it will keep its shape.
“I read that 50 percent of plastic is used once and then thrown away, so I feel there is an urgent need to find ways to replace some of the unreal amount of plastic we make, use and throw away each day,” said Jónsson. “Why are we using materials that take hundreds of years to break down in nature to drink from once and then throw away?”
The water bottle is made from algae powder and water, and entirely composed of natural materials, which can be ingested. A natural and biodegradable water bottle could be the solution to the plastic water bottle waste problem.
The algae bottle was displayed at the Drifting Cycles student exhibition in Reykjavik, Iceland, in March.
