Students from the Imperial College London (ICL) recently invented the first ever edible water container. If widely accepted, the team hopes that it can eradicate the use of disposable water bottles all around the world.

Currently, people consume thousands upon thousands of liters of water from plastic water bottles per year. The waste is then deposited in landfills and recycling plants. A small percentage of them plagues the forests, oceans, and wildlife everywhere.

People all over the world aim to eradicate the harm on wildlife, and have come up with countless ideas and inventions to better the planet, but this one has a certain appeal to it that people have really taken a liking to.

“It seems really cool,” sophomore Mehul Khetrapal said . This kind of reaction was received by many people, who thought the idea of an algae ‘water balloon’ was an ingenious idea.

The team used a method called “spherification” to blend molecular gastronomy and culinary arts in order to achieve their desired result of an effective water bottle. This same method is used commonly to encase sauces and other liquids in thin spherical containers.

“The way they did it seems pretty cool and I think the  people who did it are very smart,” said Sriram Somasundaram (11).

The ICL team spent years brainstorming and researching, before they came up with a plausible design and were able to implement it.

This invention was intended to be easy to use for regular people as a plausible substitute for regular water bottles, and is thought to have huge promise for the future.

This article was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on May 16, 2014