Scientists Turn Plastic Waste Into Edible Cookies (futurism.com) 78
A team of researchers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale engineered yeast to create cookies that were 3D printed out of plastic waste, reports Futurism:
The yeast breaks down the components of plastic compounds and agricultural byproducts like discarded plant stalks into proteins, fats, acids, and flavorings that we can eat. When these are combined together, the mixture is fed into a 3D printer that spits out cookies of any desired shape. The researchers chose to print their cookies as the Greek letter Â, creating what they call "ÂBites" — or micro bites. They haven't actually eaten one of their ÂBites yet, as they wait for university approval... "I think it has a pleasant, appealing aroma," Lahiru Jayakody, a microbiologist at SIU who led the research, told NewScientist. "And it will taste good, too. We've not tasted it, but it smells good — that's for sure — like a real cookie...."
The researchers used CRISPR gene-editing technology to reprogram yeast strains to eat polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a widely used form of plastic commonly found in disposable water bottles, food packaging, and clothes, which is rich with carbon. Before the yeast can start feasting, the PET plastics are subjected to a process called oxidative hydrothermal dissolution to break them down into smaller bits that the microbes can digest. The purported advantage of this approach is that it's environmentally friendly, using only heat, water, and oxygen. The yeast feasts on these stripped-down plastic bits, turning them into a slurry of proteins, fats, and acids that're combined with fiber, starch, and sweetener to make them more palatable. One of the yeast strains in particular was able to turn plant biomass into tasty vanilla flavorings...
[R]ight now, it's an expensive process, costing around $60 to produce a kilogram of cookies, The Guardian reported. And some experts say it's wishful thinking to believe we can 3D-print, and then eat, ourselves out of these global problems with 3D-printed, delectable treats. "We produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste. You're not going to turn it all into cookies," Jason Hallett at Imperial College London told New Scientist. "So it's not a solution to the plastic-waste crisis. There's no way you could do this commercially. We're not gonna be eating plastic cookies."
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
The researchers used CRISPR gene-editing technology to reprogram yeast strains to eat polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a widely used form of plastic commonly found in disposable water bottles, food packaging, and clothes, which is rich with carbon. Before the yeast can start feasting, the PET plastics are subjected to a process called oxidative hydrothermal dissolution to break them down into smaller bits that the microbes can digest. The purported advantage of this approach is that it's environmentally friendly, using only heat, water, and oxygen. The yeast feasts on these stripped-down plastic bits, turning them into a slurry of proteins, fats, and acids that're combined with fiber, starch, and sweetener to make them more palatable. One of the yeast strains in particular was able to turn plant biomass into tasty vanilla flavorings...
[R]ight now, it's an expensive process, costing around $60 to produce a kilogram of cookies, The Guardian reported. And some experts say it's wishful thinking to believe we can 3D-print, and then eat, ourselves out of these global problems with 3D-printed, delectable treats. "We produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste. You're not going to turn it all into cookies," Jason Hallett at Imperial College London told New Scientist. "So it's not a solution to the plastic-waste crisis. There's no way you could do this commercially. We're not gonna be eating plastic cookies."
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
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THAT'S why I'm sticking with Soylent Green.
Any cookie good cookie!! (Score:5, Funny)
Me love cookie!!!! OM NOM NOM nom
Cheap livestock feed (Score:2)
If they get the cost out of it, it'll be used in the food chain everywhere it saves money to do so.
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raising animals is inefficient and destructive
It is, that's pretty much true across the board but the question is cost/benefit. We like meat, protein is good, we've gotten very good at it. That all said in terms of energy in and calories out a herd of cattle is pretty bad compared to other options.
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Your very existence is inefficient and environmentally destructive.
That you choose to continue your existence while chastising others tells me that you are a hypocrite or an idiot, but probably both.
Eat what you like. What others eat is not your decision to make.
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You should be eating the plants directly vs. converting an animal into human food which is inefficient and environmentally destructive.
I don't agree 100%, but in general we should reduce our meat consumption.
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Your very existence is inefficient and environmentally destructive.
that's a gradient, not a binary choice. in theory there should be a sustainable compromise. achieving that would be an optimal use of resources which are actually limited, in an environment one shouldn't take for granted.
That you choose to continue your existence while chastising others tells me that you are a hypocrite or an idiot, but probably both.
you do have a point here but it's kind of lost in the framing of the issue as all-or-nothing, which is a fallacy, in exaggerating gp's attitude ... and in being a bit of a dick. it seems he hit a chord.
Eat what you like. What others eat is not your decision to make.
on the individual level, yes. but we are a society and as such we constrain our individua
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Re: Cheap livestock feed (Score:2)
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Re: Cheap livestock feed (Score:2)
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Somehow I don't see low and slow smoking beets and turnings on my log burning offset smoker is going to give me quite the same thrill and pleasure as briskets, pork shoulders and ribs....
Frankly , I've always cooked for fun and flavor, never efficiency....who cooks for efficiency, except those that dont' have functioning taste buds maybe?
Mad Chicken Disease Inbound (Score:2)
Might get some mad cow too.
Knock me over with a feather (Score:5, Informative)
No conspiracy needed. just capitalism (Score:3)
In the quest for greater efficiency, you will always find solutions that are cheaper to produce than clean up and it takes resources to search for both, except creation is an internal cost and disposal an external cost... That is before you think up any evil motives to add or hire an MBA who's trained to do so.
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Fluid bed pyrolysis isn't profitable, but it is close enough to be viable. If recycling were meaningfully mandated (hahaha etc I know) then it could certainly be done without making plastics outrageously expensive.
On one hand, good luck to us if we try to make that happen, but on the other hand we are not realistically going to stop using fuel or plastics any time soon, the two go hand in hand anyway, and looking the other way accomplishes nothing.
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Plastic recycling isn't too expensive to be practical, it's just more expensive than not recycling and leaving the waste to be someone else's problem, which makes it not aligned with the purpose of mega corporations to make as much money as possible.
There are plenty of smaller companies that use 100% recycled plastic when they still have the ability to be a good corporate citizen and do not have shareholders to appease.
You want to recycle plastic? Just kill shareholders. Then the problem will have solved it
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Well, the price certainly has the potential to come down. For one thing, a big part of it now sounds like its mostly in breaking down the plastic before the yeast eats it. The current process sounds like it's basically boiling the plastic while adding oxygen, possibly in a pressure cooker. There may be all sorts of ways to improve that. Scale, for one thing. Aside from that though, doing it at higher pressure, with added catalysts or chemicals for it to directly react with, etc. may make the pre-processing
A yeast feast? (Score:3)
"The yeast feasts on these stripped-down plastic bits..." I hope at least the yeast doesn't turn into a beast, or my fears would be increased...
A MOLD? with spores? (Score:2)
Why do we have to pick organisms that are the most durable and easily spread?? Does it breed with other molds?? Like how they infected nature with bio-engineered non-sterile plants?
That PET bottle in the ocean becomes food but the storage containers for food/medical or components in my devices that I would like to last many years, if not possibly a lifetime or two... can now rust away? One of the huge benefits and reasons for plastics is their longevity!
What's next? PE? Polyethylene? AKA the FOAMs insult
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So... a yeast that can digest plastic. Cool!... until it morphs into airborne spores and gets into homes.
You go to bed after letting the cat out, and in the morning you wake up to a lake in the kitchen along with the smell of rotting food... you had a gallon of milk, couple two-liters of pop, lunch meat and leftovers in Tupperware, all the plastic is gone (including the door seals); your TV is just the metal skeleton now, your basement is an ocean (water lines are PEX)... et cetera.
If only there was a way
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Most plastics cannot be simply melted and re-made into bottles very many times before breaking down. Most plastic eventually ends up burned or buried, or worse yet as litter.
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https://scienceinsights.org/ho... [scienceinsights.org] -- you were saying?
So, it loses it's plasticity? I imagine they can't, I dunno... add more plasticizer to the recycled bottles, add the recycled bottles to the virgin plastic... maybe they could just wash the bottles (like they used to do with cases of glass bottles and milk bottles).
Using this yeast to convert plastic bottles into cookies means that we keep using oil to make bottles which has to be drilled for and refined which pollutes... maybe someone should come up wi
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I don’t think you were the first in this thread to confuse yeast with mold (and I’m not even sure you intended to do so, though you didn’t correct the post you were replying to); however it really has nothing to do with spores, though that term is rather ambiguous since there are also other organisms that produce “spores” including some bacteria and some plants such as ferns. All of these usages refer to reproductive cells whose functions are similar but whose morphologies are
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The thinking I was posting on was: the yeast eats the plastic, reproduces via budding (local process) and spores (longer distance reproduction), and the spores get into populated areas where plenty of stuff is plastic of some type... even if the engineered yeast they use only eats one type of plastic, what prevents it from evolving into a different strain that eats ABS or PVC? Your laptop would be reduced to the motherboard and the screen dangling by the wires, if it eats PVC, kiss plumbing goodbye.
If the
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Glass and Aluminum. as good as it gets. already been done too. they even collected deposits! even if lazy people trashed them and didn't care about the deposit, they are harmless. The reason they can be recycled forever is that they are minerals which you can BURN without damaging them and all the impurities are removed (for the most part, one shouldn't generally allow mixing them with stuff that is difficult to separate.)
Everything needs a recycling tax, called a deposit slapped onto it which encourages r
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https://tinyurl.com/3x5xsvvr [tinyurl.com] -- as long as there is a demand, yada yada yada
That only puts a couple bucks in the poor people's pockets when they go out collecting them... rich people don't care about $10 from a bad of beer cans, hell, they probably toss the recycling stuff in with regular garbage.
Maybe that boxed water place is onto an idea... wonder if a milk carton can handle carbonation decently well?
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Aldi stores only charge you 25 cents if you don't put your shopping cart away and most people do that and a quarter is only worth a penny adjusted for inflation.
Fuck the rich! Outside of the wage theft that makes them rich I don't care what some some tiny minority group does. The vast majority matters due to multiplication. The rich do not consume at a linear rate to their undeserved income.
Milk cartons are only decent if they are wax coated instead of plastic coated, even so, they are not as green as glas
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"But, glass is so heavy!" "How do we send a small can of pop with our kids to school?" "But, it requires taking the bottles back to the bottling plant a mile away so they can reuse the bottles!" would be the big complaints if we went back to glass for milk, pop, beer, booze, and everything.
It'd be like going back to the 50's when the milkman brought milk and picked up the empties... nobody wants to go back in time; we've gotta rush towards the wonderful future where robots and AI does everything for us and
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Plenty of people want to go back in time! It's whatever the fashion is at the time; often throwbacks happen. Somebody with money who is clever could make it FASHIONABLE and people would go for it. Industry engineers people's behaviors plenty because most of us are just sheep. Proof of how gullible is right there in the USA's 2024 election. Look at how those rubes were all about going back to make America great AGAIN; just like fascist Italy also campaigned for.
Problem is the OIL lobby's plastics council
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So I didn't say fungi; whatever, doesn't matter to the point. People know what mold is and how it spreads easily and is hard to kill. If I said fungus Americans probably would just think of foot fungus and how uncommon that is... or maybe they'd care fearing it infects their feet?
Recycling plastic always was a scam. It barely gets recycled and at best it's like 6 times; the industry promoted it so they could shift the blame onto you and "personal responsibility" in a society which shirks responsibility prob
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Yeast and mold are not at all the same thing.
They may not be, but I want to hang with them anyway because they're both fungis.
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Never heard of that book... sounds like a decent read.
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Oh dear... That synopsis... empty gas tanks almost immediately, all the plastic in the world eaten in a few days... I mean, the basic concept is interesting, but obviously yet another book on an interesting idea written by someone whose understanding of some basic concepts is essentially magical thinking or just cartoonish. I mean, empty gas tanks instead of being full of the microbe and its excretions? Probagating worldwide in days?
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It's too bad the crowd that will totally agree with RFK Jr about every bad thing regarding microplastics will at the same cheer on the destruction of green energy projects and think climate change isn't a problem to be concerned about.
Meanwhile one of the largest factors in plastic bottles is their weight and therefore lower transport costs. Glass bottles are just too heavy when you burn dinosaur juice to move them. Aluminum helps but you also have to burn a fuckload of that same juice to make the energy
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Unless the plastic bottle ACTUALLY degrades safely, it should be banned. You talk of transport weight like that really matters but it does not and it does not compare. We are in the process of changing transportation anyhow which is a different problem; it's just a scam to change topic to something else that sucks and use that as an excuse for not changing something tangential and relatively insignificant...
Glass recycling is real. They used to have bottle deposit fees; which I've heard people claim is too
Re:A MOLD? with spores? (Score:4, Interesting)
You talk of transport weight like that really matters
In terms of why plastic bottle are so prevalent and replaced glass then yes, transport costs have a lot to do with that it's like a 10x difference in weight, spread that over millions of units and miles travelled, combined with durability and how cheap they are to make. It really is a wonder material but it's not free of negative costs as we are describing.
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Did you miss the part in TFS where they have to use an expensive chemical process to break the plastic down into simple molecules before these yeast can begin to eat it?
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So? The sheeple will view it as a breakthrough and throw pallets of money at it, even if the recycling-to-cookie rate is like a hundred bottles a year, and they believe "they're helping the environment".
Re:A yeast feast? SF addressed it decades ago. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cookies made from waste? (Score:2)
Shut up and take my money!
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Shut up and take my money!
Unless my math is wrong, per capita cost of $241/month we get 132g (4.66oz) cookies/day and eat all the plastic waste. Piece of cake!
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s/u/i/
Foodini 2.0 (Score:2)
New and improved, printing cookies from shit.
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printing cookies from shit.
I have some bad news for you about how farmers fertilize the plants you eat...
I suspect they mean mu (Score:3)
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New Trump mantra: (Score:2)
"Let them eat plastic."
Missing the point (Score:2)
"We produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste. You're not going to turn it all into cookies," Jason Hallett at Imperial College London told New Scientist. "So it's not a solution to the plastic-waste crisis. There's no way you could do this commercially. We're not gonna be eating plastic cookies."
This completely misses the point. There are significant problems with the toxicity of plastic waste not only in the human food chain but in the biosphere in general. If the plastic can really be turned into something benign enough to eat and that doesn’t contain any microplastics, that could be used for a lot of things besides cookies, anywhere from livestock feed to restoring some of the soil biomass lost to erosion via crude agricultural and forestry practices in the past. The primary issue besides
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Most plastic recycling can yield anything useful only a limited number of times before the only thing left is for it to get turned into some kind of fuel and burned.
Re: Missing the point (Score:2)
And the 3D printing part? (Score:3)
When these are combined together, the mixture is fed into a 3D printer that spits out cookies of any desired shape. ... And some experts say it's wishful thinking to believe we can 3D-print, and then eat, ourselves out of these global problems with 3D-printed, delectable treats.
Seems like the 3D printing is very optional, so why? It's probably slower and more complicated than regular automated cookie dough fabrication methods and unnecessary to the overall goals here.
middleman (Score:2)
Eliminate the middleman, just eat garbage directly.
Another step toward AFS (Score:2)
Another step to the ultimate Advanced Food Substitute.
I wonder if tilapia will eat it.
NileBlue or NileRed (Score:3)
If Nigel Braun is not mentioned in their paper, he should sue for infringement on his brand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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You appear to have poor social skills. It's OK, so do I.
Nile's experiments have turned non-food into food, multiple times. That is what he has done and that is what they have done. That is the relations.
Yes, he is a chemist, so yes he did it with chemistry. Yes they did it with biology. Doing it with biology is less difficult and less expensive, but the method is NOT what is important.
The thing everyone cares about is taking non-food and turning it into food. That is why people click the link.
Also, nob
Soylent (Score:2)
Purple?
We're eating plastic!!!!!
This is the plot of "Stray" (Score:2)
US food... (Score:3)
I can see the next advert "Now with edible wrapper"
"We're not gonna be eating plastic cookies." (Score:2)
Not with that attitude we're not!
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Did they stop to ask themselves (Score:2)
The yeast breaks down the components of plastic compounds and agricultural byproducts like discarded plant stalks into proteins, fats, acids, and flavorings that we can eat.
We can eat it, but should we?
When these are combined together, the mixture is fed into a 3D printer that spits out cookies of any desired shape.
Look, if even a printer spits them out, I probably will too.
well.. (Score:2)
"We produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste. You're not going to turn it all into cookies,"
Someone isn't thinking big enough.