London Marathon Will Replace Wasteful Plastic Bottles With Seaweed Pouches

If you’ve ever been in a marathon or seen one, you might be familiar with how throughout points during the marathon, runners 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 why in the upcoming London Marathon that is taking place this Sunday, the organizers will be turning to the use of seaweed pods. These are pods, 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 those who might be worried about the brininess of the seaweed, 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 ultimately hoping that these seaweed pods will help reduce the number of plastic used during the run, which they estimate 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.

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