Engineering360: "Crowdfunding a Consumable Spherical Water Bottle — the Ooho!"

No-ho.

Bottled water allows sipping and reclosure. Its edibility requires outer packaging for sanitation and antipuncture, likely plastic.

And cost. No further comment.

Maybe in flavors for kids, who will enjoy popping in mouth. Will need small size, oohitos?

Appeal comes from widespread and scientifically unsupportable fear of plastics, which people will express but not pay for.

Only a few years ago when people wanted a drink of water, they used a public drinking fountain. Then some marketeer thought of selling water instead of giving it away. This was thought of a way to make water portable, although the canteen had already been in use since Roman times, the mindset was that purified City tap water in a disposable plastic bottle was somehow safer and better for human consumption, never mind the fact that billions of school children had grown up drinking purified chlorinated drinking fountain water and those same children grew into 90+ year old adults with no ill effects.

Water was even put into recyclable steel cans, that when empty and disposed of into the ocean, sank to the bottom and due to the corrosive effects of salt water dissolved away, plus because they wouldn't float, migratory animals, birds, mammals etc wouldn't likely be eating and swallowing them.

Now some genius comes up with an idea that will double or quadruple the quantity of disposable trash that will be floating in the oceans and dispersed over Terra firma.

How does your post relate to the Ooho? I don't know if its poly-seaweed floats or sinks, but if it's eaten along with the water, it doesn't matter and won't multiply ocean trash. My concerns with cost and outer protection do matter.

As for the single-use plastic bottle which is your focus, I have carried a canteen at times, and that's what all the steel or plastic refillables are today. Very common in California, where I think both of us are. My "canteen" is now a plastic bottle with tap water (which I agree is safe), but I use a soft-drink bottle -- stronger than the usual disposables because it had to take internal pressure. I am worried about sterility of any refillable, but especially the metal ones favored by the "plastophobes," as they are opaque and often hard to clean.

Very little water is in cans, which are used much more for beer and carbonated soft drinks but their strength isn't needed for tap water. And the plastic beverage/water bottles don't float either, but that doesn't matter because they are not toxic.

The image of purity is a very strong motivator, even if it's technically unfounded. The convenience of the one-use water bottle goes along with the desire to have what you want wherever and whenever you want it, which is as "corrosive" to our environment as the packages themselves. Finally, in CA we get money back for the water bottles, so if they get into the ocean at all, it's because of the affluence, arrogance or laziness of the user, mostly the latter. I don't have an answer to that one.

There are quite a lot of slobs out there, especially in California. Oh ya they festoon their cars with coexist stickers and such but they are some of the first to unwrap any wrapper and throw it on the ground while they stuff that something into their mug. If it wasn't for all of the dumpster diving going on by the bicycle riding night people, there would be plenty more of those one time use water bottles heading down the L.A. river right now.

That water globule has to be wrapped in something and that something ain't gonna be picked up by night time trash pickers, so it's going to be blown down into the gutter regardless of the painted flows to ocean sign near every rain culvert.

It's almost like those gardeners with the leaf blowers, do they really think that blowing your leaves and grass clippings for your yard on to your neighbors property is really going to clean and beautify the neighborhood ?

Dumb leads to dumber.

And this is just another in the long and ever growing list.

It looks a brilliant idea, however there are other issues to be considered.

The big issue is the hygienic/contamination concerns about the handling of the spherical water bottle. Anything would stick to its surface and then in people mouth!

It would require another packaging to be transported or handled...and there we go again with more plastic.

Fruit juice packed this way already exists, it's called an apple.