Ever seen a biodegradable water bottle? I do not. And in fact I'll tell you about it.
The Bottle, fruit of the work of the Californian startup Cove, is the first totally biodegradable water bottle to end up on the market.
What does “biodegradable” mean in your case? Well, it means that at best it will degrade in the compost bin. At worst, it will do it (quickly) outdoors: even in the sea, where every day around 8 million pieces of plastic end up which DO NOT degrade.
How is The Bottle, a biodegradable water bottle, made?
The unique water bottle created by Cove is made with a substance called PHA which looks like plastic, but is actually produced through precision fermentation.
Cove provides microbes with some products: nutrients, sugar, vegetable oil and others. Microbes transform this “food” into a polymer. End. Point.
During composting, PHA is itself exposed to the action of other microbes, and this allows it to degrade rapidly.
Do we believe it or not?
Cove officially launched its first bottles in December at the stores of Erewhon, a California-based organic food chain.
Using PHA could be a huge step in the right direction to combat plastic waste. Also because the flood of plastic bottles used today for water (already a delirium in itself) take 450 years to biodegrade.
Even with variables due to the type of environment where it will be thrown away, at worst a PHA bottle will be biodegradable within a time range between a year and a half and four and a half years.
“Plastic water bottles have become the emblem of our modern pollution crisis,” he says Alex Totterman, founder and CEO of Cove, in a press release.
“By bringing a truly biodegradable plastic alternative to customers and the industry as a whole, we can begin to reduce plastic waste in our communities.”
