If you’ve ever been in a marathon or seen one, you may be comfortable with how all through points amid the marathon, srunners will be handed bottles of water to drink and rehydrate themselves. Unfortunately, these bottles are a huge environmental waste since they take hundreds of years before they actually break down.
This is the reason in the up and coming London Marathon that is occurring this Sunday, the coordinators will turn the utilization of seaweed pods. These are units, known as Ooho, that contain an energy drink and all runners need to do is pop the pods in their mouth, bite down on it, and the drink will be released. The pod itself, since it is made out of seaweed, is completely edible.
For the individuals who may be stressed over the brininess of the ocean growth, the company that makes them, Skipping Rocks Lab, says that they have removed the taste from it. The pods themselves are also biodegradable within six weeks if they are not consumed. According to Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, “The marathon is a milestone … we are hoping we will demonstrate that it can be used at scale in the future.”
The organizers are at last trusting that these seaweed pods will help decrease the quantity of plastic utilized amid the run, which they gauge could be around 200,000 bottles. Skipping Rocks Lab are also looking to apply their tech to other products to make them more environmentally-friendly, such as cling film and the plastic lining used in disposable coffee cups.