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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.
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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.
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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.
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It’s not as bad as it sounds.
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"
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Mmm, the terephthalate adds extra crunch
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The process takes ~2 days, costs ~$60/kg, and can't scale to the 400 million tonnes of plastic waste produced annually. Jason Hallett of Imperial College London: "There's no way you could do this commercially. We're not gonna be eating plastic cookies."
Nobody has even had the courage to taste one.
It's all hat and no cattle.
So they wrote this absurd article just for the thrill of getting everyone upset?
Yup. Now rage baiting isn't just on Facebook, reddit and twitter.
Thanks to Rage Bait Inc (LLC) franchising opportunities , now all the social networks can present clueless false information framed in such a way to anger the public and generate angry clicks.
Sign up today and you too can profit from the Enshittification of the internet.
All hat and no cattle. I have never heard that expression. I'll be looking that up
Outside of the US that expression is rare as rocking horse shit.
Rocking horse shit. I have never heard that expression. I’ll be looking that up
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Soylent Green is plastic!
It’s Carbohydrates all the way. Always has been 🔫
Bold of you to assume you'll be able to afford the plastic bottle cookies, peasant!
i love when left wing progessive lemmys loop around and turn into hard right conspiracy theorists
this also isn’t a meme, does this comm have any moderators?
Lemmy is just awful about reacting only to the headlines, especially with popsci reporting. The above referenced work is kick ass - converting one of the most common garbage plastics into sugar with a bioengineered yeast is cool as hell. sure it's a headline born of the petite dystopia we live in, but it's a really optimistic breakthrough and not at all a dystopian thing in itself.
Lemmy is just awful about reacting only to the headlines
That's pretty much normal all over the internet. It's a bad human behaviour heavily exploited via attention economics, of course such bad traits get reinforced. Staying in one place and thinking gets disincentivised (you might even put down your phone! Outrageous!!) and outright punished through dark patterns and antifeatures, faster scrolling and high frequency interaction with populistic takes is being rewarded with shiny stuff on your profile, Karma, hearts, stars etc.
I remember seeing the youtuber NileRed doing similar experiments:
Making grape soda from disposable vinyl gloves.
Turning paint thinner into cherry soda
Making hotsauce from plastic gloves
My first thought was "Hey we're one step closer to Star Trek replicators." :D
In this instance people are talking about "the article" and there isn't even an article LOL. Lots of lemmers devoutly believe they're better than the rest of the world - whether it's because of their ethical purity or neurodivergence or whatever.
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Turning old plastic into food? I've seen this one before!
Not even soylent green anymore :(
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I mean, it's not a bad idea, we certainly have enough of the stuff
Where else are you gonna get your recommended daily allowance of Vitamin P while in space?
Cyberpunk is cumming
I miss the times when outrage food was made of bugs 😔
At the times it take to make these, I bet there will not be much left of the PET molecule structure.
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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