London Marathon exchanges plastic bottles for edible seaweed pouches

At the London Marathon on Sunday, runners weren't just handed plastic water bottles to quench their thirst — they also had the chance to try a new, edible pouch made from seaweed extracts filled with a sports drink.

Organizers wanted to do something about the amount of plastic that is left at the end of the marathon, and decided to try the Ooho capsules, created by the London-based startup Skipping Rocks Lab. Their edible capsules are made from the "building blocks of seaweed," co-founder Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez told CNN. "We remove all the green stuff and the smelly stuff." The resulting pouch is tasteless, and can hold a variety of liquids.

The casing is edible, but also biodegradable; while it takes 450 years for a plastic bottle to decompose, it only take six weeks for the Ooho pods. More than 41,000 people ran in the London Marathon, and organizers said they were able to reduce the number of plastic bottles from 920,000 last year to 704,000 this year. The Ooho capsules are cheaper to produce than plastic bottles, and Garcia Gonzalez said he hopes the marathon is proof that the seaweed pouches "can be used at scale in the future."

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