What’s the secret ingredient in these cookies? Plastic : NPR

New research at the American Chemical Society meeting showcased a potentially edible cookie made out of — plastic!

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

This next story is about taking plastic and converting it into cookies – yes, cookies. This is a process that might help deal with pollution and other problems. NPR science reporter Ari Daniel reports.

ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Transforming plastic into a snack may sound a little tough to swallow. But Lahiru Jayakody, a synthetic microbiologist at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, says just think of a cow.

LAHIRU JAYAKODY: Can you eat grass? No. But cow take the grass and it produce milk. We use milk to make many, many different product.

DANIEL: In other words, living creatures are like chemistry labs, converting raw ingredients into new materials. Microbes excel at this kind of thing, so Jayakody decided to try genetically engineering yeast to digest plastic, specifically the kind often used in water bottles and food packaging. Ph.D. student Sandhya Jayasekara first took the intact plastic, along with ground-up corn husks and stalks, and broke it all down into simpler molecules.

SANDHYA JAYASEKARA: So that those molecules are available as a food for the yeast.

DANIEL: She then gave it to the yeast, which processed this mix of disintegrated plastic and corn to make a gluey protein paste, which Jayasekara mixed with vanilla and beta-carotene that were produced by other yeast and different food ingredients, like oatmeal. A 3D food printer then turned that slurry into small cookies. Here’s Lahiru Jayakody.

JAYAKODY: There is no micro- or nanoplastic embedded into this cookie. So you are not eating plastic.

DANIEL: Nor has anyone actually eaten the cookie yet. There are still safety tests to be done. The process is pricey, uses a lot of energy and not much of the plastic makes it into the final cookie.

JAYAKODY: This is a proof of concept, right?

JAYASEKARA: Kind of a beginning of a journey.

DANIEL: Still, the researchers say they hope the cookies may, at some point, be made from plastic waste on-site in extreme or difficult environments, like outer space or disaster zones. This work was presented at the American Chemical Society meeting in Chicago last week.

PAMELA SILVER: I think the concept is right on the mark.

DANIEL: Pamela Silver is a synthetic biologist at Harvard Medical School who wasn’t involved in the research. She says the idea of turning plastic into food isn’t new. The real barriers to making it a reality tend to be scalability, cost and texture.

SILVER: Texture comes from fats. So in all the foods you eat – meat, cheese, everything you eat – it’s the fat that makes you enjoy it.

DANIEL: There’s not much fat in these new plastic-derived cookies, but Silver welcomes this kind of thinking, which may one day provide a sweeter solution to a less-than-palatable problem. Ari Daniel, NPR News.

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