from the call-me-when-they've-turned-them-into-donuts dept.
Hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic pollution are created each year. One option may be to turn the pollution into food, but critics voice concerns
Plastic bottles and agricultural waste can be converted into consumable cookies via genetically engineered yeast. The team members behind the initiative are currently awaiting institutional approval so they can taste the product.
Plastic pollution and food scarcity are two of society's thorniest problems. Sandhya Jayasekara and her colleagues from Southern Illinois University Carbondale hope to use the former to solve the latter – potentially eliminating both in the process.
The first stage of the process is to take used plastic bottles – sourced from a supermarket – and discarded sweetcorn plant stalks and leaves, and put them through a process called oxidative hydrothermal dissolution. This uses heat to break down the materials into components that microbes can digest.
Those components are then fed to yeast that has been genetically altered using CRISPR gene-editing technology. This allows the yeast to convert the components into a variety of useful ingredients, including proteins, fats and acids, as well as vanilla flavouring and beta-carotene, which the body can convert into vitamin A.
Finally, fibre, starch and sweetener are added to the mix, and the paste is extruded through a 3D printer into any desired shape. The resulting cookies have been dubbed µBites, pronounced microbites.
The researchers, who are presenting the work at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Chicago on Friday, are eager to try µBites for themselves as soon as their university approves the experiment. But they are confident that the cookies are both safe and tasty.
"I think it has a pleasant, appealing aroma," says Jayasekara. "And it will taste good, too. We've not tasted it, but it smells good – that's for sure – like a real cookie."
Team member Lahiru Jayakody, also at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, says it will take 20 years of additional research before plastic waste can be pulled from oceans or landfills and converted to safe and appetising food, but that he hopes the process alone can inspire others to tackle the problem of plastic waste in innovative ways, leading to "a social shift" in the way we think about the problem.
But not everyone is convinced that µBites can make a meaningful impact on plastic pollution. Jason Hallett at Imperial College London says the research is fun and interesting, but also, in all likelihood, a practical dead end.
"We produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste. You're not going to turn it all into cookies," says Hallet. "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."
The concept certainly faces challenges. In a time when there is growing concern about the amount of microplastics in our environment, food and even our brains, it could be difficult to sell the idea of food that is actually made from plastic. Add the stigma of genetic engineering to the mix, and manufacturers may find a limited appetite for µBites.
Hallett says the best solution to the plastic crisis is recycling through processes we already understand, but logistical problems with gathering such widely cast waste and the low cost of virgin plastic mean it isn't being done on a large enough scale.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Wednesday September 02, @01:33PM (2 children)
The entire idea is wild to me. To think there are university students that are trying to eat more plastic? I mean, I appreciate the out of the box thinking at least. I'd love to see a debate between these kids and the microplastic kids.
Realistically, while this may not turn into 400 million pounds of cookies, if these kids figured out a way to turn plastic into vanilla flavoring, you will 100% see Nestle and the rest of them trying to figure out how to monetize this.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02, @02:06PM
Eventually...currently they're still too busy slowly turning our chocolates into chocolate flavoured and coloured artificial sweetener laden solidified palm fat abominations.
R.I.P. Cadbury's, Fry's and all the other brands that they've fucked up.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02, @03:45PM
I'll bet the cookies are better if they use all the rest of the ingredients, and leave out the plastic...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02, @01:49PM (7 children)
The issue isn’t about recycling the plastic into something else. In all likelihood we already know how to recycle the plastics they propose to use (sorry, didn’t check).
The challenge is collecting and sorting the waste plastic, in/from people’s trash, but also from illegal dumping in nature, and moving it all to the recycling plant, in a way that is altogether cheaper than to source whatever material is normally used instead.
Until the day we have armies of AI robot overlords doing the collecting and sorting for us and maintaining themselves at no cost to humanity, recycling will not happen to any meaningful level.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Username on Wednesday September 02, @02:12PM
They need a process to create plastic beer first. Then all the druggies will be collecting the plastic instead of leaving it on the sidewalk.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02, @02:32PM
Huh, if that ever happens, "AI" is more likely to recycle humans into plastic, which would be more useful to the machine.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 02, @02:35PM (2 children)
> In all likelihood we already know how to recycle the plastics they propose to use (sorry, didn’t check).
I saw this article somewhere else, in my skim of it I vaguely recall that this process uses a wide variety of unsorted feed-stocks, including many presently considered un-recycleables.
It makes a bit of sense, to recycle you're usually looking for some structural integtity / purity / inert-non-reactive-integrity in the recycled "output."
For food stock, you're trying to break it down not so far that there's no energy left in the bonds, but far enough that the bonds that remain have some energy value during digestion and that those bonds are readily accessible to yield their energy to the digestive processes.
Filler / fiber / inert materials in foods are both natural and healthy for the process, not that these inert materials are guaranteed 100% healthy, but it's concievable that they could refine the inert junk to be 99.99% benign.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03, @04:11AM (1 child)
IMO as long as we are still burning coal etc for energy, it's just more efficient to burn plastic for energy too than to do all that sorting.
Sort the garbage properly and landfill the stuff you can't recycle or safely/viably burn for energy, marking and documenting them. If you deposit enough, future generations might mine them for materials. Once you have enough tons of "rich ore" deposited, mining it for gold, copper etc, makes sense.
It's not like there's a high percentage of gold in gold ore. I bet our garbage often has higher concentrations.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 03, @03:23PM
If you're going to sort trash - almost no formerly edible garbage should make it to a landfill. A giant mulch pile takes less room than a landfill, and it never "fills up" or "reaches capacity". Garbage and other compostable debris go in at one end, and marketable product comes out the other end. That includes paper and cardboard, grass clippings and leaves, pruning debris, road kill, virtually all bio mass, with the exception of hazardous medical waste. And, yes, that includes most wood products. Wood decomposes more slowly than most other biomass, but I have accomplished that feat repeatedly. But, people, or at least Americans, resist the idea of sorting their refuse, and everything goes into the landfill.
Composting plastics is a possibility, it just takes a different process. If these guys are producing edible goods, then the same stock will compost into fertilizer. Given the choice, I would rather fertilize the garden with that recycled plastic, and let the plants sort out the nutrients before I eat it.
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02, @03:42PM
> moving it all to the recycling plant, in a way that is altogether cheaper than to source whatever material is normally used instead.
Main plastic feedsources are petroleum and methane (natural gas).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Wednesday September 02, @04:45PM
If they were at all serious about recycling, there'd be a significant tax on the people producing the materials in the first place as industry is where most of that is coming from anyways. It's why it's so hard to actually know what you can recycle as sometimes they use more than one type of plastic in an effort to save a bit of money. They'll use a food safe plastic on the side of a TV dinner tray and something not food safe on the outside of that same tray making the entire thing not recyclable. But, there's no real way for the customer to know what is and isn't recyclable. I get this picture of example things that are recyclable and have largely given up on recycling anything that isn't obvious because it shouldn't be my full time job to work out what can and can't be recycled so some psychopaths can save a few dollars a ton producing it.
(Score: 5, Touché) by OrugTor on Wednesday September 02, @01:58PM
"Soylent Green is bottles!"
(Score: 5, Touché) by spiraldancing on Wednesday September 02, @01:58PM (1 child)
Really quick-and-dirty back-of-napkin math here, assuming 1-to-1 conversion weight (which is probably a foolish assumption, but let's just say)...
400,000,000 tons of plastic waste a year ... that converts to 13 *trillion* one-ounce cookies ... or ~1400 cookies for every human being on the planet ... per year.
Put it another way, day-umm, we produce a lot of plastic waste.
That's not even getting into whatever other chemicals and resources are needed to bring about this magical plastic-to-cookie conversion.
Lets go exploring.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 02, @02:39PM
1400 cookies per year, a bit less than 4 one ounce cookies per day... if they tasted good, with a bit of variety, I could do that. Hell, mix 'em with good stuff and I could easily eat 4 2 ounce cookies per day, sometimes 6 at one sitting - more often 1-2 at lunch and 1-2 later in the day.
Pay people to eat them, use the "recycled" output as fertilizer - rebuild depleted farm soils. It beats the Soylent Green approach.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by looorg on Wednesday September 02, @05:35PM (1 child)
So first you drink your soda, then you eat the bottle. Zero waste. Also the bottle is probably recycled plastic.
Eat recycled food. It's good for the environment, and okay for you.
(Score: 4, Informative) by jb on Thursday September 03, @06:51AM
All my food is recycled: first the cattle eat the grass; then I eat the cattle, in the form of my steak. Surely that's got to count as recycling?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday September 02, @07:17PM (3 children)
And what about free-range organic vegan ones?
And in a year or two, will they be "causing cancer?" Or making children hyperactive like blue smarties back in the 80s?
Does anyone remember the Japanese Poo Burger [thebustednews.com]?
Can you tell I'm having a nervous breakdown?!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 02, @08:34PM (2 children)
The primary driver of cancer is: life. Non-living things have very low cancer rates.
> making children hyperactive like
children? I mean, if you like 'em docile and want 'em small and easy to manage, just train them to a malnourishment diet, no sugars, minimal calories. This whole modern trend of using meds to make 'em manageable was much simpler last century when you just don't feed 'em so much and they won't be such a hyperactive pain in the ass.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 03, @03:28PM (1 child)
Exactly. Kids are no longer kids, IMO. I roamed my county as a kid, there was no telling where I might be on any given day. Today, an unaccompanied child or group of children will be accosted by either a do-gooder, or a child molester. Kids are only found in supervised settings these days. What kind of childhood is that?
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 03, @05:10PM
The child molesters were always out there, and probably in about the same per-capita numbers, but the denial and story burial were much stronger in the past.
do-gooder numbers are way up, and while they're annoying - as long as the cops understand that do-gooders gonna do-good (and you've got nothing to hide) - it's not a big deal. So far - 2 boys with profound autism, in their early 20s now, say 40-person years' experience, we have had maybe 15-20 police interactions for various reasons, the vast majority being elopement: kid got away, we don't know where - better to call it in early than late. Consistently, 100% (in our small sample size) the cops have been 100% understanding and supportive and helpful and kind. do-gooder public interactions are much more frequent, and I'd rate them at about 99%+ genuine intent kind caring people, but every so often there's one out there you just need to walk away from because there's nothing to be gained from deeper engagement.
Our kids aren't (much) of a problem for the world, we do have one who doesn't understand that you "just don't go in other people's homes", he does no harm while he's there - but given our shoot first, declare your fear of the intruder as legal justification for murder later society he's got to be supervised for his own safety.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 02, @08:29PM (2 children)
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission. Attributed to Admiral Grace Hopper, though I'm sure that I heard it before she was an admiral.
I simply cannot imagine that a bunch of kids made cookies - and they are waiting to get permission to taste them. It's simply inconceivable. Unless they are afraid of the product to start with.
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RootTwo on Thursday September 03, @02:19AM (1 child)
It happens:
One summer afternoon long ago, my 8 year old brother made a cheesecake.
When it was done, he called my mom at work and asked if he could have some.
After some discussion, he decided to wait, so the whole family could have it after dinner for dessert.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 03, @03:30PM
I might have done that around age 10 or 12. But I guarantee that I would have had a taste of the finished product before Mama got home! Even today, I sample my products as I cook or bake!
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RedGreen on Thursday September 03, @05:12AM (1 child)
Humans can be turned in nice edible portions of meat, it does not mean you should be doing it. Quite frankly we should be eliminating as much plastic use as possible in an effort to save both ourselves and the planet from that abomination.
"Cervantes definitely was prescient in describing a senile Don fighting against windmills." -- larryjoe on /.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 03, @12:33PM
Plastic is a by-product of petroleum refinery. The more oil we use, the more plastic we get. Industry / retail are constantly looking for new ways to use it, why else do you think we get those crappy 100% plastic backyard play-sets from Walmart for $69.99?
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Thursday September 03, @08:23AM
I am a bit afraid of the nano plastics that now have permeated the whole ecosphere including our bodies. If a waste water treatment facility could add another step to employ the yeast to remove nano plastics that would make me sleep better (well, when I think about this problem). However, I believe the yeast will not be able to consume the nano plastic on account of low concentration, unless maybe, when they are genetically modified to only survive on plastics.