Bold of you to assume you’ll be able to afford the plastic bottle cookies, peasant!
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
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.
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!
It’s Carbohydrates all the way. Always has been 🔫
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
Cyberpunk is cumming
