Presenting the Innovative Ooho

By: Daniela Silva

Ooho an edible water “bottle” has been developed by design students in imperial college london. Created by Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, Pierre Paslier, and Guillaume Couche this new development may bring down the plastic plague that litters our oceans and landfills. Cheap, easy to make, and with a great green initiative the Ooho presents a strong competitive front to compete with bottled water.

It takes two pennies to produce one Ooho and even better, you can make them at home, the ingredients can easily be ordered online and be made in you kitchen safely in minutes and takes trial and error to get the consistency you prefer. In order to be able to take these around you will need a clean container and clean hands to handle them in order to consume them.

With a natural base of calcium chloride and brown algae, the Ooho will have a substantially fast  decomposition time as compared to plastic bottles which take 450 - 1000 years to decompose, and some plastic bottles may never biodegrade.

Ooho is still a product yet to be introduced reviewed and improved, yet the world is completely delighted to see such a fun, environmentally friendly and innovative product that has the potential to push us into the right direction of cleaning up our earth and taking care of our people.

Sweet Renewable Materials

By: Jessica Robertson

      Many everyday products are oil-based, including plastic, gasoline, and rubber; the non-renewable nature of these materials means their scarcity is increasing. Research is underway heavily to find new options for products so common in our world today. Biodiesel is a perfect example of a renewable material that is not based on oil, being derived instead from plants. While the invention of biodiesel advanced the renewable energy sector, researchers are still searching for more earth-friendly options.

            Isobutene, a product ubiquitous in the chemical industry, will soon be derived from plants, namely sugar. Research found that if sugar is introduced to a particular microorganism, the product of the fermentation and digestion process is gaseous isobutene. This process is highly renewable since sugar grows back, making it a huge improvement on oil.

            However, concern arises when dealing with renewable material derived from edible plants; with so much hunger in the world, is it really justifiable to use food for conversion to energy rather than for feeding hungry mouths? For this reason, the pilot plant in Germany is transitioning from sugar beet, which is edible, to sugar from wood or straw, which is not edible.

Making the production of isobutene completely independent from both oil and food production is a responsible choice for the future of our planet.