Future Of Drinking Water

Drinkable Water Bubble Could Kill the Plastic Bottle Once and For All

 Smart design company Skipping Rocks Lab has successfully crowdfunded their next big move.

The eco-friendly water bottle of the future could be an edible, drinkable, compostable bubble. From London-based creators Skipping Rocks Lab, Ooho! is poised to be an antidote to the wasteful and manipulative world of plastic bottled water.

 

 Since 2014, it's been surging through the UK startup scene, and already Ooho! has raised £605k in two days of crowdfunding on Crowdcube. Half of the money will be used to develop Skipping Rocks Lab machinery, and the other half will pay for research and development into making the material, which is already comparable to plastic in cost of production, cheaper, faster, and better.


 Ooho! makes drinking water actually look fun. It also cuts out harmful plastic waste that interferes with terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, like the giant garbage island swirling in the Pacific Ocean. The membrane itself is made out of a chemical from seaweed. The team behind this brilliant idea is called Skipping Rocks Lab, a bunch of engineering graduates from RCA and Imperial College London who first introduced their ground-breaking concept in 2013. Since then they’ve been working hard to make their dream a reality, and a crowdfunding page they recently set up has already raised over 600k GBP (750k USD) in just a few days. Given that the US alone uses an estimated 35 billion plastic bottles per year, and given that plastic water bottles take hundreds of years to decompose, this sounds like a brilliant idea that everybody should get behind.



The scope of Ooho!'s environmental impact has been met with anticipation from heavy hitters in the startup game, earning support from the Climate-KIC accelerator and winning both the Wired Retail 2016 Start-up of the Year and Lexus Design Awards.


Ooho! has been available to Londoners through small pop-ups over the last six months, and Skipping Rocks Lab is in talks with Virgin Sports and Live Nation to potentially distribute at large events like marathons and concerts as soon as 2018.