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Microbite 3D Printed Cookie Made from Plastic
This is a Microbite, a 3D printed cookie made from upcycled plastic. This experimental snack may seem like your dystopian nightmares come to life, but it’s actually real food designed for a world where resources are limited.
Lahiru Jayakody Professor Southern Illinois University Carbondale: If you really think about the food cycle, any food, one of the major material is carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, other few elements. So that’s how they have this food system. So plastic has it. Why not making food?
Southern Illinois University Carbondale Working with NASA
In 2021, Lahira Jayakodyi’s team at Southern Illinois University Carbondale answered a call from NASA to develop food that could be made from stuff carried on board a spaceship to Mars. He has spent his career using microbes to break down and recycle plastic. In this case, he found one that could turn trash into takeout.
The team worked out a process to break down PET plastic, the kinds you find in bottles or food packaging, and turn it into simple molecules. Then they feed that mush to bioengineered baker’s yeast, which turns the molecules into edible proteins and vanilla flavoring.
Sandhya Jayasekara Grad Student Southern Illinois University Carbondale: We have a good feeling about the Microbite cookie. We have not tasted it, of course, but we are working on it. We are conducting the experiments we need to make sure this cookie is safe to eat.
Microbite Cookie Plastic Chemical Process
The idea is similar to some chemical processes already used to make food. The vanilla in ice cream, for example, is often derived from fossil fuels. Whether in space or on Earth, something like a Microbite cookie could be useful for our future.
Lahiru Jayakody Southern Illinois University Carbondale: Within another two, three decades, we need to really think about how we feed our society. We have to use all the resources we have. Waste is not waste anymore. There is something that we can extract even from the plastic.
Popular Mechanics – Here, Have a Cookie. It’s Made of Plastic.
Popular Mechanics Article Link
