Creator of Breathable Caffeine Wants You to Drink Your Drink, Then Eat the Bottle

This is a pretty damn good idea, replicating nature more closely, most items in nature are self contained. My own concern would be contamination of the shell product which is meant to be consumed. I wouldn't want to eat something that's been sitting on a store shelf in reach of everyone walking by. No thank you!

Playing Devil's Advocate since 1978

"The only constant in the universe is change"
-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC - 475 BC

Imagine the savings at garbage dumps if we could eat the wrappings on food like the peel of a potato (which I love better than the potato itself). Would be nice if all plastic paper products could be edible--they just have to switch the alpha-beta link in cellulose somehow. But that's a hard nut to crack.

i love it when people take the mad scientist approach to a problem! can't get enough caffine now you can breathe it in, bottles cramping your style, shove em down your pie hole. running low on energy? this new implantable organ synthesizes ATP directly from electricity. feeling peckish? plug yourself in for a quick pick-me-up great for those 2 o'clock battles you always face.

to mars or bust!

Contamination would be my #1 concern too. We have packaging for multiple reasons, not the least of which is safety and avoiding the "yuck" factor. If anything, I think making sure that all packaging is easily recyclable and decreasing the amount of packaging used for the same amount of goods would be a far more impactful step.

Just think of the boxes or bags that you get which are only half or 2/3 full of the product. There's a lot of wasted packaging there. Also, if we want to be mathematical about it, we should reconsider the packaging shape of most boxes. If we're talking about flat sided boxes (which we have to, due to easier stacking, etc), then we should consider the fact that a box that is closer to a perfect cube requires the least amount of packaging for the internal volume.

For example, if we have a box that contains 125 cubic inches of space and has H/W/D dimentions of 10"/5"/2.5", the packaging required for the box is 175 square inches. If, however, we change the dimensions to 5"/5"/5", we still have 125 cubic inches of space, but we only use 150 square inches of packaging. A 15% reduction in packaging, just to change the shape of the box! Add to that a reduction of empty space inside the boxes, and you could easily reduce packaging by 40% or more! That's HUGE in terms of resources never used to make packaging in the first place, which is much better than making them and then recycling some of them.

Of course, spherical packaging would be the absolute most efficient, but then stacking gets really hard so it becomes far less practical.

This is really cool, but he is really going to have to figure out how to kill contamination. Maybe a gel covering that is bio-degradable?

i think we are forgetting how we originally got to the point of packaging. yes packaging solved a big problem; food going bad quite easily would now be able to be stored for well over it's normal half life. but i think we are forgetting the times when going to the store to get some bread meant actually talking to a baker instead of consulting an aisle of bread.

when i see this i think of all the supplies going to like the meat department or the baker's section of your grocery store and then it is kept in the cooler once it is "made". it'll go bad quicker, but in all reality it's a better decision because we don't have to use plastics with our food.

i'm an engineer, when i learned about plastic it was fantastic: here is something that melts at a low temperature, is stable in situations were even glass isn't, and it is extremely hard for it to degrade and cheaper than copper. by engineering standpoints this is a miracle material; however i think it was bloody freaking stupid to put it next to our food on a consistent basis. plastics are made out of stuff that simply does not belong in the human body, just like water in the wrong spot of an engine is a bad idea.

i really think this will work.

to mars or bust!

Can a bottle restructure the world? Their all waste their all fee, and we all need controlled clean water. Can we give the whole world plumbing by modifying our waste bottles? Put and extra set of threads rings at the top and bottom of the bottles. Cut of the ends and everyone has free pipe. The bottles connect to form limitless pipe. Simply pull all three thread rings apart and blow mold the bottle body. Free water infrastructure cleaner controlled waste water. Gone is the open sewer for all. Bottle waste equals fresh clean water.

huh. looks a lot like mochi.

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why learn from your own mistakes, when you could learn from the mistakes of others?
“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible” -Albert Ein

Have we humans become so desperate and hungry that we are even making bottles taste good? That's fine with me(not that I am so ecstatic about eating a bottle). But I like to know that my food (if that is what you can call a orange-flavored bottle)is not contaminated and is perfectly safe to eat. How would I know that the person who processed this washed his/her hand and didn't wipe their runny nose with it? How can I know this,how can I know that. Those are questions some citizens would want to know. They really have to think about it.

If people eat it, it's food. What makes this any more of a container for the food than a hard candy shell around a chocolate? Or the cake around the cream filling of a Twinkie for that matter? They will still require some kind of non-edible packaging if they expect people to eat the container. I wouldn't buy a Twinkie that didn't come with a wrapper, I'm not going to buy an edible plastic oatmeal encrusted yogurt pocket without one either.
I admit that it's interesting though. Maybe they could have a thin, biodegradable film coating that you can peal off.