Scientists Turn Plastic Waste Into Edible Cookies Because That’s the Future We Deserve
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32 replies
I can't be the only person who was wondering how this guy torrented a cookie.
There are untold additives to plastic, no one knows what was put in what for the most part. There is no reliably removing all of that, even if this outrageous claim of making food out of poison trash was accurate as such.
The additives are the same reason you never want to recycle plastic, it's worse than landfilling it, releasing those additives into the air, and the resulting product is worthless garbage that can't be used for any real useful purpose. It's only a thing because the industrialists fobbed the blame on us for the world they created in the 70's and 80's.
I think the people at Chips Ahoy already have that market cornered anyway.
Ernie Keebler, billionaire bastard.
The AI isn't even trying to make Mich McConnell look realistic anymore, this is ridiculous.
Domino's cornered the cardboard market
That sounds like a challenge
we consume a ton of plastic already, what does it matter if its converted to cookie
This is going to make the weirdest "Cookie Monster"... Its going to be more like "Cookie Godzilla" All hopped up on BPA/PTFE and micro plastics!
Everyone's talking about this like it's impractical. This is just the beginning! Scientific advancements often start as completely impractical processes!
I'm positive that over time, this waste-to-cookie process will be refined and refined until it includes not only plastic waste, but human waste as well.
The potential is there! We just need to collect the billionaires and get started!
I'm like 80% sure billionaires are already edible
Like all meat, it's primarily the accompanying sauces and gravy that makes them edible.
I would mess with some Sweet and Sour Billionaire.
Yes but so is powdered wood pulp. You gotta add that plastic, yeasty flavoring!
Of course they discovered it in America.
They killed USAID and now they'll revise it and send fucking plastic cookies to starving people and then celebrate their "humanitarian" actions.
This is some Black Mirror level shit.
Digesting plastic into organic molecules is definitely good. Making it food-grade is probably impractical, but making it not plastic is good for sure.
I always wonder how long it's gonna take before plastic-eating bacteria start to proliferate in the wild. There was a while back in prehistory when there was no microbe in existence that could eat wood and trees were almost immortal, and that's how we got certain fossil fuels, because when a tree died by getting knocked over by wind or whatever, the wood went into the ground undigested. I think. The main appeal of plastic is that it's currently nigh on invincible to microbial attack and so is perfect for sealed containers (when you need to keep something fresh and preserved), but I assume eventually plastic will be just as prone to rot as cardboard. I wonder, will glass then make a comeback?
Wood is a biological material made from molecules that have been sitting in Earth's biosphere for hundreds of millions of years:
Wood
→ cellulose
→ hemicellulose
→ lignin
→ sugars/aromatic compounds
→ microbial metabolism
Those molecules contain lots of chemically accessible bonds, especially C–O bonds. Plants built them using biological chemistry, so other biological chemistry can, in principle, take them apart.
An enzyme isn't a tiny animal chewing through plastic. It has to contact a polymer chain, bind it in an active site, chemically cleave a bond, release the products, and repeat.
A plastic can thwart that by being:
hydrophobic + highly crystalline + insoluble + chemically repetitive + physically inaccessible.
There's no evolutionary law saying organisms must eventually become capable of rapidly consuming any energetically favorable substance.
Evolution has to find a chemically feasible pathway. And even if it does, decomposition might be:
rather than
And amusingly, we could simply change the plastic. If PET suddenly became unsuitable for decades-long applications because PET-eating microbes became ubiquitous, we'd manufacture polymers resistant to those enzymes, add protective layers, alter crystallinity, or use different polymers.
All and all, I’m doubtful microbes will come to our rescue. Unless we engineer them for the task, that is.
Those bacteria already exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudideonella_sakaiensis
The catch is that “can eat plastic” and “can solve plastic waste” are very different thresholds.
The bacterium almost completely degraded a PET film in about six weeks at 30C. But that film was extremely favorable material, thin and only about 1.9% crystalline.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/10546322/
That's important because a real PET bottle is much harder. PET chains in crystalline regions are packed tightly together, and the enzyme has trouble getting the polymer into its active site. Typical waste PET can have crystallinity above ~25%.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-025-07764-x
Also, P. sakaiensis attacks PET, which is a polyester. It does not give us a general solution for:
PET happens to contain chemically convenient ester bonds:
Whereas polyethylene is basically:
There's no corresponding easy hydrolysis reaction. That's a much harder biochemical problem.
So if you dumped P. sakaiensis into a landfill, it wouldn't start consuming “the plastic.” It would encounter a giant mixed pile, only some of which is PET, and much of that PET would be physically difficult for it to attack.
Maybe we can engineer something inspired by P. sakaiensis. I don’t think it overcomes the bigger hurdles by itself, though.
No, but there is a great prize for any organism that figures it out and unlocks all that plentiful energy, especially if it encodes the "recipe" for future generations.
And that's just natural selection. Artificial selection could possibly speed that up, too, if it's actually possible.
Artificial selection has got to be possible, given we’ve done it to our fruit merely by happenstance over the generations. And our dogs, too.
I wonder if plastic would be more like diamond. We don’t see enzymes breaking down diamond, even though that’s been around for plenty of time.
Natural selection could probably get there if the conditions are right, just as artificial selection could probably force those conditions in a lab. Yet I feel the it’s probably much less likely than was the case with wood.
It's good but nothing beat's Mom's homemade polyethylene.
that song polyethylene pam will finally make sense
Lucky! All my mom made me was polyurethane!
Kicks rocks "shucks"
Nobody else going to point out that the cookie in the thumbnail looks way too much like a condom?
Cone head's bubble gum
Is the plastic entirely dissolved in the process? I feel like the cookie wouldnt be edible otherwise. If we can turn plastic into fat sugar whatever with yeast, that'd be THE news. So i guess something is missing here?
Well that's what the yeast does, mostly. It eats broken down PET and creates fats and other stuff that is actually in food. They also state the process costs $60 per kg and we produce so much waste it cant be considered a solution to our trash crisis.
Read the article bro
i read it. Its thin. Why is it so expensive? how much heat is needed for how long?
Not much heat. Yeast can't live above 37C.
Yes. I know we're fond of corn around these parts, but there aren't little plastic corn kernels in the microbial poo. Unprocessed plastic molecules would eventually get eaten by another organism in the vat.