Know how long a plastic water bottle can take to decompose? Up to 1000 years. Know how many bottles of water America alone drinks in a single year? approximately 50 billion.

Scared yet? You should be, because unless we start firing our garbage out of giant cannons and into the sun, it’s safe to say that some day soon we’re all going to be living on one great big floating ball of trash.

It’s a pretty bleak prospect, but thanks to people like Icelandic Product Designer Ari Jónsson, such a grimly apocalyptic scenario could be avoided if we all just got a little greener. Take his water bottle for example. It’s made from algal, a product of algae. It’s 100% natural and 100% biodegradable. It keeps its shape until it’s empty and then it begins to decompose.

Ari exhibited his project during this year’s Reykjavik design festival DesignMarch. Let’s just hope that major manufacturers take some inspiration from his brilliant invention. Otherwise, the future will look like Wall-E. But not nearly as cute.

(h/t: Dezeen)