As the London Marathon gets underway, thousands of runners will be handed Ooho seaweed pouches instead of throwaway plastic water bottles.
This is in a bid to curb environmental pollution by the non-biodegradable plastics.
Top journalist Julie Gichuru has praised the innovation.
Gichuru said in a Twitter post that such innovations will create a difference since plastic bottles have been a menace world over.
That is amazing! Love it!
— Julie Gichuru (@JulieGichuru) April 28, 2019
Plastic bottles are a total menace, innovative solutions like this make all the difference!
The Ooho seaweed pouches are created by the startup Skipping Rocks Lab.
They cost less money to produce than plastic bottles.
But unlike plastic bottles, the pouches, which are created from seaweed extracts, decompose in less than two months.
Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, one of the founders of Ooho, told CNN that the company uses “the building blocks of seaweed” to make the capsules.
“We remove all the green stuff and the smelly stuff,” said Rodrigo.
The pouches of water, have a thin membrane holding the water that’s both edible and tasteless, meaning runners can bite a hole in the capsule, guzzle the water inside, then swallow the cover.
If runners don’t fancy eating their pouch, they can chuck it on the floor – the pods biodegrade within six weeks, which is far more environmentally friendly than plastic’s degrading time of hundreds of years.
However, the marathon won’t be entirely plastic-free, as at other spots along the route there will be water bottles available.
The organisers have guaranteed that all water bottles handed out this year will be at least partially made of recycled plastic, and that all discarded bottles will be collected and recycled.
The total number of plastic bottles used for the race will go from 920,000 in 2018 down to 704,000 this year.
