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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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It's not as bad as it sounds. PET plastic has the same atoms as sugar, so it's matter of reorganising it.
The researchers engineered an yeast that eats plastic and "ferments" it into sugar
NileRed on YouTube has done a few interesting things like turning plastic gloves into hot sauce through different chemical processes.
It's more of a fun science demonstration than anything meant to be even remotely practical to create food from waste, and there are some pretty nasty chemicals involved in some of them that really have no business being anywhere near food
But it does I think drive home the point that everything is basically made out of the same stuff and it's a matter of figuring out how to break it down and put it back together in the right way to be useful.
The alchemists were right, they just focused on the wrong area of the periodic table. We can't turn lead into gold, but we can turn plastic into mouthwatering hamburgers!
steamed hams you say?
It's an old family recipe.
I thought we were having plastic bottles
Pressed hams
We've so far turned lead into gold 2 times
It's just so expensive it's not worth doing except to see if you can
It's also weirdly easiest to turn things much more radioactive but further away into gold, such as Osmium, but the gold that it produces is radioactive
Actually we can turn lead into gold by shooting it with particle accelerators. It is not profitable though.
You can turn lead into gold; it was something that was demonstrated in my HS science class. It's just that the chemical used to make the change is far more valuable than the gold you get out of the process.
We actually can turn lead into gold and fairly easily now, it's just that it would cost you billions of dollars to make pennies worth of gold.
People really need to stop writing about the torment nexus because all it's doing is giving the oligarchs more ideas...
The researchers on this one are convinced they can eat the cookies. And while scientists underestimating personal risks isn't unheard of (hence why they need university approval), it means there isn't anything obviously dangerous with this process.
One step closer to my favorite utopia, Gay Space Communism* (replicators).
* coined by rightwing chuds, but I really like this term.
For the last 16 years there has been some kind of organism that could break down plastic. Never seems to go anywhere.
This kind of thing always have a long trail of "almosts" before a breakthrough makes it viable outside of the lab. Every attempt makes us closer to it.
I once saw a comment saying that a bacteria that consumes plastic could be apocalyptic if it got out of the lab and spread everywhere
The apocalypse of trash turning into cookies.
Cookie Clicker was right!
I mean, aren't most of these "scientists find microbe that eats plastic" stories just them finding something in the wild that already has such an adaptation, rather than engineering something new? The idea that a plastic eating organism makes plastic nonviable to use anymore is a bit like saying that we can't make stuff out of wood, paper, natural fibers like cotton or wool, etc, because those things will degrade given the right circumstances and time.
Nah some are engineered too, as a possible way to recycle none-recyclables
The issue is usually they are woefully inefficient
Not particularly, it really would only affect capitalist pigdogs, everyone else would be fine
Not really apocalyptic per-se. The nightmare scenario would be that plastic would start bio-degrading similar to wood products and become far less viable as a material for long-term use containers. Yeah, it would require a massive shift in how we store things, esp. highly reactive chemicals, but it'd hardly be apocalyptic.
The ones I remember reading about all come with a big caveat: The organisms can only work after the waste has been through some capital and energy intensive pre-treatment, like thermal depolymerization, which makes the economics unworkable for recycling.
Maybe one day we can do the heat treatment with direct solar energy.
This is actually a huge step in the direction of star trek food replicators.
Always thought that would be graphene with nano robotics.
Still, a new dystopian scifi trope is born. Can't wait to see it in action: "ingredients: 50% PET bottle sugar, 40% insect protein, <10% human excrement, flavor, coloring"
By the way the article and researchers describe it this is going to target rich people that want to feel they are doing something for the environment, while keeping all their habits (kind of like lab grown meat).
Mmm, the terephthalate adds extra crunch
Sodium and chlorine are the same atoms in table salt. Not gonna have them by themselves.
Yes, but if you feed the pure sodium and chlorine into any process that outputs pure NaCL it's exactly the same as any other table salt. Same with PET and sugar, if yeast turns the PET into 100% sugar it's not different from any other sugar.
The problem with this is "pure". Almost no chemical process results in pure output on its own, there usually needs to be a shitton of cleaning and refining afterwards, see Nile{Red,Blue}.
Assuming the yeast gets all of it and there isn't any left, sure.
But hey, I'm sure we can trust the processed food industry to have our best interests at heart.