The Cove water bottle is a thin, sturdy cylinder, eggshell-white with a matching lid.

If someone does give you this bottle, it would be a remarkable achievement. Scientists and businesses have spent many years and much money trying to replace everyday packaging with natural materials that don’t pollute the Earth — so far, that’s given us little beyond compostable straws. But the challenge hasn’t deterred Cove from its own five-year journey to producing the first “fully biodegradable” bottle of water.

The company has raised $20 million since 2018 from luminaries like Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff; media heir James Murdoch; and Valor Equity Partners, an early backer of Tesla Inc. Totterman also bagged investment from the DJs Diplo and Kygo, singer Ellie Goulding and a few pop stars he wouldn’t name.

Cove’s bottles start in kitchens. RWDC Industries, a chemical supplier with US headquarters in Georgia, first collects cooking oil from restaurants and ferments it into polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHA, a polymer meant to dissolve in water or soil without any toxic residue. From there, the PHA pellets move to Cove’s 25,000-square-foot factory, where they are sent through machinery to vacuum away moisture, sift out metal, and stretch, cut and mold the material into a hollow canister fit for water. A label is then printed directly onto each bottle (“Cove’s plastic-free, renewable bottles”). The ink, made from algae, is meant to biodegrade, too. Water from a purification plant nearby is poured in. By Cove’s estimates, its bottles will disintegrate in water and soil in under five years.