Edible Blob Sets Out to Replace Plastic Water Bottles -- But Is It Practical?

While it might look like a gelatinous mass that could have come out of the ocean, the translucent pouch is actually a design team's solution for a cheap, eco-friendly replacement for plastic water bottles.

Water might be the healthy drink of choice, but the plastic water bottles many purchase to hydrate on the go result in up to 1.5 million tons of plastic waste a year and reusable water bottles can bulky to carry around -- and they require forethought.

That's why three design students create Ooho, which has already won a design award and is on display at a design show.

The concept won an award from a contest hosted by Lexus and Design Boom. (Image source: Rodrigo Garcia Gonzales, Pierre Paslier, Guillaume Couche via Design Boom)

“The reality is that more and more, when we drink water we throw away a plastic bottle,” Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez told Fast Coexist. “Eighty percent of them are not recycled. This consumerism reflects the society in which we live.”

The water is held in this non-rigid, spherical form by a gel made from calcium chloride and a compound found in brown algae.

“The double membrane protects the inside hygienically, and makes it possible to put labels between the two layers without any adhesive," Gonzalez told Fast Coexist.

Watch how an Ooho is made:

The idea is that the Ooho drinker bites a hole in the outer layer to suck out the water inside. They could also eat the blob as a whole.

In addition to being a bit messy -- in Fast Coexist's video water drips on the tester and the table -- there's the other challenge of keeping the outside of the package itself clean so it's sanitary enough for consumption. These things, Fast Coeist wrote, could be the sacrifice of giving up plastic bottles.

Watch the test:

Though the design has some obstacles to overcome, it could be a viable concept for towns like San Francisco, which announced earlier this year it was banning the sale of plastic water bottles.

(H/T: Gizmodo)