PETpla.net Insider 05 / 2017

MATERIALS / RECYCLING PET planet Insider Vol. 18 No. 05/17 www.petpla.net 22 ”Have you eaten your water package yet?“ could be the question being asked if you are resorting to an Ooho instead of a PET bottle to hydrate. The spherical flexible packaging Ooho is the first product of Skipping Rocks Lab, a start-up based in London. Their goal is nothing less than a revolution of the water-on-the-go market. The scientists are pioneering the use of natural materials extracted from plants and seaweed, to create packaging with low environmental impact – and afterwards, you can actually eat it! brown algae and calcium chloride in a specific proportion in order to gener- ate a gelification on the exterior of the liquid. The final package is a simple, cheap, resistant, hygienic, biodegrad- able and even edible water blob. It also requires less CO 2 , energy and money to produce than an equivalent PET packaging. The seaweed being used for the bite-sized packages has several advantages: besides being fast grow- ing and available all over the globe, the packaging membrane – if not being eaten but peeled off – is biodegradable within four to six weeks. Since the scientists set up the company in 2014, they have been improving the properties of the mate- MATERIALS Special rial and developing the technology for which they filed a patent application. At the moment, Oohos come in dif- ferent flavours and three sizes (20ml, 55ml and 150ml) and are mostly being sold at public events and private functions. A wider audience will be targeted in 2018. To achieve this, the team is preparing to get their fully- automated production machine up and running: “As a part of this scale- up, we are developing a manufactur- ing machine that will produce Oohos automatically” explains Rodrigo García González. Skipping Rocks Lab is part of the Climate KIC start-up acceleration pro- gram founded by the European Insti- tute of Innovation & Technology (EIT), and the scientific team is based in Imperial College London. The start-up just closed their first investment round via crowdcube with £850,000 raised and 904 investors. www.skippingrockslab.com www.climate-kic.org Ooho team from left: Manuel López Romero, Chemical Engineer, Lise Honsinger, COO/CFO, Pierre-Yves Paslier, Co-founder & Co-CEO, Rodrigo García González, Co-founder & Co-CEO, and Eugenio Perez de Lema Bühl, Industrial Prototyping Inspired by the way nature encap- sulates liquids using membranes, the architect Rodrigo García González and packaging engineer Pierre Paslier have come up with Ooho as an alternative to established beverage packages. After experimenting with the culinary technique of spherification with different ingredients, proportions and dimensions, a recipe was found to create Ooho with a double gelatinous membrane in different sizes. The tech- nique applies sodium alginate from the Sea-weed based packaging for water, soft drinks, spirits and cosmetics Thinking outside the bottle