You have probably experienced a scenario similar to this:
Some warm fries lay on the plate, ready to be eaten, but plain fries sprinkled with salt need something a little extra. Without the last ingredient, eating the fries wouldn’t be as enjoyable an experience. You walk over to the fridge, open its door, and take out a bottle of your favorite ketchup. There’s hardly any ketchup left in it now, mere red smudges on the bottle’s sides. But you, as an environmentally friendly person, are determined to squeeze out every last drop of ketchup you can before purchasing a new bottle. You flip open the cap, turn the bottle over, and squeeze. The bottle’s squeaky noises in reply to your squeezing only challenge you to squeeze harder. After minutes (or is it seconds?) or so of wrestling with the trapped air within the bottle and getting a few drops of tomato sauce on your fries in return, you give up.
Within the next two years, if the invention by the team of mechanical and nanotechnology engineers at MIT is successfully placed in the commercial market, you would no longer have to face that problem. The team, working at the Varanasi Research Center, had come up with a super slippery surface coating—an ultra-low adhesion surface, in technical terms—called LiquiGlide. A 20-second video clip posted on YouTube depicting ketchup sliding effortlessly out of a bottle went viral with over 125,000 views. Despite the team’s focus on “big problems,” such as water and energy, one of the goals was to develop potential commercial products. Thus LiquiGlide, a food-packaging product was born. Made from a secret cocktail of edible, nontoxic materials, LiquiGlide can be sprayed onto bottles or food containers and work not only on ketchup but also jelly, mustard, and substances including glass, plastic, metal, and ceramic. The coating could be used for anti-icing, preventing clogs in form of oil and gas line or for non-wetting applications as in the case of windshields.
LiquiGlide first made its appearance in MIT’s $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition, where it won an Audience Award. Currently the team is fielding interview requests, filing for patents, and is planning to launch a startup this summer. The team is also in talks with bottling companies. The bottle market for sauces alone is $17 million. If mass produced, the bottles would help to ease recycling, since people would be able to use every last drop of sauce contained within them. Recyclable squeeze bottles would save big caps and, in return, 25,000 tons of petroleum based plastics per year. Now you know that I wasn’t exaggerating when I said ketchup bottles could save the world. Soon enough, you won’t have to deal with the annoying remaining traces of ketchup on your bottle again!
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