This is a huge step in the right direction. 

Americans throw away 35 billion plastic bottles every year and that’s a problem because it takes plastic around 450 years to decompose, which is kind of a long time. Ari Jónsson is a product design student who studies at the Icelandic Academy of Arts. Recently he came up with a way to create a completely biodegradable water bottle using red algae powder.

Ari Jónsson exhibited his biodegradable bottle at a design festival in Reykjavik earlier this month.

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After reading about the amount of plastic humans waste every day Ari decided to do something about it.

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“I read that 50 per cent 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.”

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Then Ari asked the million dollar question: “Why are we using materials that take hundreds of years to break down in nature to drink from once and then throw away?”

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To show Ari doesn’t just talk a big game, he started studying the strengths and weaknesses of certain substances, eventually landing on a solution to our plastic problem made from algae.

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The substance can be formed into a bottle by adding water, heat, placing the resulting jelly into a mold and then putting the mold into a freezer.

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If the bottle remains full of water it will keep its shape, as soon as it’s empty it starts to decompose – you couldn’t ask for a better alternative.

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You can even eat the bottle when you’re done, making Ari’s design both practical and waste free – hopefully the world takes notice.

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