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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
