Doctor Seaweed always want to try and educate with things you didn’t know about seaweed and algae.
Did you know you can get plastic bottles made of seaweed! (And yes, you may want to try to eat it as well)
‘A fruit that was made by man’ – this is the way to describe a new breakthrough in science – seaweed bottles! The product is mainly made from sodium alginate (algae derivative) and calcium chloride. The bottle designer Pierre Paslier believes that this invention is so harmless to both environment and people that we can even try to eat it (but if you are really hungry for sea vegetables, we suggest to take a look at some other ways of incorporating the food of the future to your diet and benefit from it).
Why Seaweed Bottle?
Mr Paslier states: ”So many things are wrong about plastic bottles: the time they take to decompose, the amount of energy that goes into making them and the fact we are using more and more.”
Completely agree! Here I collected some facts and numbers about plastic bottles that may really shock you:
- We buy approximately 50 billion water bottles a year.
- Producing one bottle of water requires three times that water volume. And of course, it becomes unusable afterwards.
- As many as 17 million barrels of oil are used every year during the manufacturing process.
- It is said that about 10 percent of the plastic can be found in our oceans which means the material sticks to the ocean bottom, getting into the food chain, and simply cannot be recycled!
- Talking about the water quality, it is considered that modern plastic bottles we usually buy in the supermarkets are not very ‘water friendly’, as plastic infiltrates to liquid and may cause various health issues. While seaweed bottle contains ‘plastic you can eat’.
What is more, an innovational package costs just 1p per unit to be produced.
The Director of Science and Innovation at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change Mr Ellerington believes that this product can be widely applicable in different markets and we may soon see seaweed packages everywhere as the potential is really high. And he really means it! Just take a look at these numbers: Bill Gates is planning to invest 2 billion dollars in renewable technologies and projects aimed at increasing sustainability levels!
The ‘algae bottle’ project received the award and shared it with Alchemie Technologie. Their innovative contribution is also very creative – a digital way of dispensing dye.
By the way, did you know that seaweed can also be used in the textile industry?
Calcium alginate is one of the seaweed components that is used in fibre development and is very useful when it comes to producing bandages.
No doubt soon we can write a post on this too.
These are some of the new and varied seaweed benefits we wanted to share with you.
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