A bottle of algae can solve one of the environmental problems

Every year, humanity consumes a huge amount of drinks sold in plastic bottles. But a rare person thinks about what happens to empty bottles after that. And with them, in fact, nothing happens. The plastic from which they are created can decompose in vivo for tens and hundreds of years. That's how tens of millions of tons of plastic garbage accumulate in landfills, in the seas and oceans. But Ari Jonsson, a student at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, knows how to solve this problem. He created an unusual bottle of algae.

The main task that Ari set for himself was to reduce the life cycle of bottles. Waiting for decades for the plastic to decompose is not the case. That is why Ari decided to create a container for liquids from agar-agar - a product of the processing of red and brown algae growing in the Black Sea, White Sea, and also in the Pacific Ocean. Agar is used in the food industry as a substitute for gelatin, which is why the inhabitants of Malaysia called it “agar”, which means “jelly”. The agar-agar bottles invented by the student retain their shape only when they are filled with water. But, as soon as you empty the bottle, the container immediately shrinks and in just a few weeks decomposes under natural conditions. You can even eat an empty bottle if you suddenly have such a desire.

“We must ask ourselves: why, in order to drink water only once, do we use materials that decompose under natural conditions for hundreds of years?”, The inventor from Iceland thinks.

The water in such a bottle is completely safe for human health, but, as you know, it can be a little brackish due to the use of a specific material. Ari Jonsson understands perfectly well that his invention may not be an ideal solution to the problem, but the main thing is to set an example to other inventors, and then, by joint efforts, you can approach the issue from many different angles. Today, there are technologies for processing plastic bottles, but even in the USA the percentage of recycled plastic containers in 2014 was only 31% of the total.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/technology/butylka-iz-vodoroslej-mozhet-reshit-odnu-iz-problem-ekologii.html.