Seaweed Bottles

The Environmental Innovation: Seaweed Bottles

Humanity is on the brink of an environmental catastrophe, not just due to pollution of the air, water, and soil with various chemical production waste or hazardous emissions but also because of the accumulation of garbage, which takes hundreds of years to decompose. Many scientists are concerned about the problem of accumulating household and construction waste and are therefore seeking various ways of reusing them. For example, from construction waste, bricks can be created. But what to do with materials that cannot be reused?

Two Solutions:

1. Develop a technology that will help process such waste without harming the environment.
2. Replace the material with one that will decompose quickly and environmentally friendly.

A student from Iceland proposed making liquid bottles not from polyethylene terephthalate, which degrades over thousands of years, but from recycled seaweed. The bottle developer, Ari Jónsson, claims that after use, it can even be eaten, but in general, such radical measures for disposal will not be necessary.

By mixing agar-agar powder with water, the substance holds the required shape well as long as there is liquid in the bottle. After the liquid runs out, the shape begins to deform, decreasing in size, and then naturally decomposes from a few weeks to a couple of months.

“Sea jelly” is a mixture of complex polysaccharides obtained from brown and red seaweeds. Agar-agar is not a new discovery; it is actively used as an additive E406 in the composition of many products in the food industry: marshmallows, marmalade, jelly, and more.

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