In March 2016, Ari Jónsson, a product design student at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, showed a water bottle made not from plastic but from agar, a gelling powder extracted from red algae. Filled with water, the bottle keeps its shape. Once it is empty, it begins to soften, shrink and break down, and in principle it can even be eaten. Jónsson presented it at DesignMarch, Reykjavík's annual design festival, and photos of the bottle collapsing on a bed of seaweed went around the world.
Headlines at the time claimed a student had "saved the planet". The real story is more interesting and more modest: a clever material experiment that points at a genuine problem, with some honest limitations that its own designer was quick to admit.
The problem the bottle responds to
Jónsson has said the idea came from reading about how much plastic people throw away, citing the claim that around half of all plastic is used once and then discarded. Single-use drinks bottles are one of the most visible examples.
Recycling helps less than many people assume. A widely cited 2017 study by Roland Geyer and colleagues estimated that of the roughly 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic that had become waste by 2015, only about 9 percent had been recycled, around 12 percent had been incinerated and about 79 percent had ended up in landfills or the natural environment. Only about 1 percent had been recycled more than once.
How long a bottle lasts once it escapes into nature is harder to pin down. The figure of 450 years that often appears online comes from an estimate compiled by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Woods Hole Sea Grant for plastic bottles in the ocean. It is a rough estimate rather than a measured lifetime, and plastic does not so much vanish as break into ever smaller fragments, but the point stands: a conventional bottle outlives everyone who drinks from it.
What agar is
Agar is a jelly-like substance obtained from red algae, mainly seaweeds of the Gracilaria genus and the Gelidiaceae family. It has been used in Asian cooking for centuries in desserts and jellies, works as a vegan alternative to gelatin, and is a staple of laboratories, where it sets the growth medium in Petri dishes.
Its useful property for a bottle is the way it behaves with temperature. Agar dissolves in hot water, sets into a firm gel at roughly 32 to 42 °C, and does not melt again until it is heated above about 85 °C. That means a cast agar shape stays solid at room temperature and even on a warm day. It is not a plastic, though some early reports described it as one; it is a natural polysaccharide that microbes can break down.
How the bottle was made, and how it decomposes
Jónsson mixed agar powder with water to make a jelly-like material that can be moulded into almost any shape. He worked out the right proportions by trial and error, heated the mixture, poured it into a bottle-shaped mould, and chilled it until the agar set. The result is a translucent, slightly cloudy bottle with a thick wall.
The key design idea is that the bottle needs its contents. While it is full, the water helps hold the gel in shape. As soon as it is empty, the bottle starts to dry out, sag and collapse, which is exactly what the photo sequence below shows. In Jónsson's words, "as soon as it's empty it will start to decompose."
The bottle full of water, standing on a bed of dried seaweed, a reminder of the algae the agar comes from. At this stage it looks much like a frosted plastic bottle. Photo: Ari Jónsson
With most of the water gone, the walls look more opaque and creamy. The gel is starting to lose moisture now that there is no liquid inside. Photo: Ari Jónsson
Empty but still upright. The bottle holds its basic form for a while, which is why it works for drinking and then begins to fail only afterwards. Photo: Ari Jónsson
The neck has collapsed and the body is leaning as the agar dries and shrinks. This sagging is the visible start of the breakdown. Photo: Ari Jónsson
The bottle has slumped to a short, rounded stump, darker in colour, about half its original height. Photo: Ari Jónsson
Shrivelled into a narrow cone, the material now looks more like dried fruit leather than packaging. Photo: Ari Jónsson
Near the end of the sequence, a small brown lump remains on the seaweed. Exactly how long full decomposition takes depends on conditions such as moisture and temperature. Photo: Ari Jónsson
The water inside is drinkable, though it may pick up a faint, slightly salty taste from the agar over time. Jónsson found the bottle itself hard to describe, likening the taste to a seaweed-flavoured jelly, and said it could be eaten once the drink was finished.
(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)
Why it is a prototype, not a replacement for plastic
Jónsson himself was careful about claims. "I can't claim that this is the perfect solution for our problem with plastic bottles," he said. The bottle was a concept, and it has clear practical problems:
- It tears easily. Agar gel is far weaker than plastic, which matters when bottles are packed, shipped and dropped.
- It starts failing once empty, so it cannot sit on a shelf for months, be refilled for long, or survive a long supply chain as a conventional bottle does.
- It affects the taste of what it holds over time.
- Hygiene and manufacturing at scale would need solving before anything edible could be sold as packaging in shops.
None of that makes the idea pointless. Design prototypes like this one are meant to change what people think is possible. Since 2016, other designers and start-ups have experimented with seaweed-based films, sachets and drink pods for short-lived uses such as events and takeaway food, where packaging only has to last minutes or days. The common thread is matching a material's lifetime to how long the package is actually needed.
Recognition and what readers can take from it
The bottle brought Jónsson, then still a first-year student, wide attention online, and he later won the Project of the Year prize at the Reykjavík Grapevine Design Awards, announced in March 2017.
For everyday readers, the most useful lesson is less about algae than about single-use habits. A refillable bottle, used for years, avoids hundreds of disposable ones regardless of what they are made of. Where disposables are unavoidable, putting them in the right recycling stream still matters, even if recycling alone cannot solve the problem.
A related idea from another part of the world: Leaf Packaging in Asian Supermarkets: A Closer Look.
Sources: Photos: Ari Jónsson; ScienceAlert: This biodegradable algae-based water bottle breaks down when it's empty; Iceland University of the Arts (LHÍ) news on Ari Jónsson's award; Iceland Monitor, 20 March 2017: Reykjavík Grapevine Design Awards; Wikipedia: Agar; Wikipedia: Plastic recycling (Geyer et al. 2017 figures); World Economic Forum: How long everyday plastic items last in the ocean (NOAA/Woods Hole Sea Grant estimate).
COMMENTS