Billions of plastic containers are thrown away annually.

It's an activity which creates countless environmental catastrophes and causes unimaginable damage to the natural world around us. 

However, now a simple solution is really taking off: edible water bottles that look like a miniature water balloon.

Dubbed Ooho and jointly created by Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, Guillaume Couche, and Pierre Paslier of Skipping Rocks Lab in London, the biodegradable device has the potential to change the way people around the world hydrate.

It is created by taking a frozen ball of water and then encapsulating it in an edible membrane layer constructed from calcium chloride and brown algae.

The total cost of creating a single unit is around a cent and the process is actually inspired a culinary technique called spherification.

Although it was originally unveiled last year, Ooho recently received a €20,000 sustainability award from the EU – an investment which could signal that we're about to see a lot more water blobs.

Mr Paslier told The Guardian earlier this month: "At the end of the day you don’t have to eat it. But the edible part shows how natural it is.

"People are really enthusiastic about the fact that you can create a material for packaging matter that is so harmless that you can eat it."

He added: "So many things are wrong about plastic bottles: the time they take to decompose, the amount of energy that goes into making them and the fact we are using more and more."