{"id":102506,"date":"2022-11-30T19:25:34","date_gmt":"2022-11-30T19:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/?p=102506"},"modified":"2022-11-30T19:25:34","modified_gmt":"2022-11-30T19:25:34","slug":"scientists-and-the-military-want-us-to-eat-food-made-from-plastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/scientists-and-the-military-want-us-to-eat-food-made-from-plastic\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists and the Military Want Us to Eat Food Made From Plastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

DARPA-funded research seeks to tackle the climate crisis and global hunger by producing a protein powder from plastic and bacteria.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Biologist Stephen Techtmann wants people to eat plastic.<\/p>\n

He isn\u2019t imagining anybody chowing down on Funko Pops, but rather plastic in a safer, palatable, powdered form you could swig after a grueling iron sesh at the gym. Chugging down a plastic-derived protein powder for gains would come with an unexpected, ecological advantage: fighting the rise tide of plastic waste.<\/p>\n

Plastic pollution is a colossal problem worldwide. According to the UN Environment Programme, humans have been creating plastic waste more than ever since the early 2000s, with about 400 million tons generated annually. Much of that waste circulates our waterways and oceans where there are literal garbage patches rivaling the size of Texas.<\/p>\n

While cleaning up is doable and there are various organizations engaged in the task, it\u2019s not without its challenges, both in terms of scale and recyclability. Only nine percent of plastic waste actually gets recycled. Much of that has to do with how labor intensive and expensive the process is. Plastic\u2019s worth also degrades with time with each reuse; making new plastic is cheap.<\/p>\n

But scientists including Techtmann are looking toward biodegradation and repurposing plastic. At his lab at Michigan Technical University, bacteria with hardy \u201cstomachs\u201d are treated like microbial guinea pigs, chomping down on processed plastic to churn out an edible, protein-rich byproduct. The idea, basically, is that humans could one day consume this byproduct.<\/p>\n

Using organisms, whether big or small, to do the dirty recycling work isn\u2019t a novel idea. Scientists have known for some time that mealworms\u2014the larvae of the mealworm beetle\u2014like to go ham on polystyrene, also known as Styrofoam. Recently, researchers in Spain discovered an enzyme in wax worm saliva that can degrade polyethylene (or PE), which accounts for up to 30 percent of daily use plastic.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy background has always been in trying to study bacteria from the environment and how we can use them to solve problems<\/em>,\u201d said Techtmann in an interview. \u201cI had been working on oil spill clean-ups for a long time when I was thinking how oil and plastic have a lot of things in common. Plastic is derived from oil, originally.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Since there are quite a number of bacteria out in nature like Alcanivorax borkumensis that have been used to clean up oil spills in the past, Techtmann wondered if these tiny microorganisms could turn their voracious appetites to plastic instead. Taking it a step further: could they transform plastic into food? (Maybe, daresay, impress a fussy Gordan Ramsay?)<\/p>\n

In this vision of the future, you wouldn\u2019t be eating plastic directly but rather the cells produced when the bacteria feed off the plastic.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you think about it from a molecular level, the components of bacteria are very similar to food we already eat<\/em>,\u201d said Techtmann. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of protein in them; they\u2019ve got lipids, fats, and vitamins. The product we\u2019re producing at the end is very much like a protein powder that\u2019s already been processed. So what\u2019s leftover are microbial cells, but none of them are alive. You\u2019re really just using them for the protein and lipids they provide<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The official name of the project is Biological Plastic Reuse by Olefin and Ester Transforming Engineered Isolates and Natural Consortia, or BioPROTEIN. It\u2019s a multidisciplinary effort partly funded by DARPA that brings together biologists, engineers, and chemists across Michigan Tech to realize a concept that feels firmly within the realm of science fiction.<\/p>\n

While still a work-in-progress, Techtmann\u2019s team have managed to create small amounts of this protein powder, which no one has yet taste tested but, he said, smells fairly yeasty and aromatic like Vegemite (Aussies rejoice).<\/p>\n

So how does it work? The plastic\u2014mostly common ones like PE, polypropylene, and polyethylene terephthalate, which is used in bottles\u2014has to be chemically pretreated for a couple of hours in a reactor much like how birds premasticate food for their babies. This process turns the plastic into an oily sludge, which allows the bacteria to metabolize the material quicker, in a matter of days versus years.<\/p>\n

These more manageable plastic chunks are then fed to a diverse community of bacteria, species like Pseudomonas and Rhodococcus. The bacteria gorge themselves on this veritable buffet, multiplying their numbers and making more bacterial cells, which are about 55 percent protein. Once all the plastic sludge has been consumed, the bacteria are sent to the microbial slaughterhouse, so to speak.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of these bacteria are related to any of the bacteria that could make humans sick. And the process we\u2019re developing kills of all the bacteria prior to using [them] as food, basically cooking or pasteurizing them<\/em>,\u201d said Techtmann, referring to the heat treatment used to make raw milk safe for human consumption.<\/p>\n

As food scarcity and insecurity continues to climb by the millions, Techtmann and his team are hopeful they can simultaneously tackle the problems of hunger and plastic waste. They expect scalability, both in terms of how much protein powder can be made at any one time and where it can be deployed, in the next couple of years, but first after conducting some preliminary field tests.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur grand vision, if you will, is to develop something that is relatively small, it could sit on the back of a pick-up truck, and then basically power itself without requiring a huge amount of energy<\/em>,\u201d said Techtmann. \u201cThe advantage of that is that it\u2019s not something you would need a full-scale industrial facility to do these kinds of conversions<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the grand vision is not without challenges. Currently, the chemical pretreatment is energy-intensive, and so the scientists are figuring out ways to provide enough power\u2014potentially through solar panels attached to the sides of an all-in-one device. Another obstacle is ensuring the product is safe for food consumption and to demonstrate that to food regulatory agencies, which Techtmann and his team are investigating.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to make sure we\u2019re doing a very thorough job of addressing those safety concerns because we want to produce a food product that, in the end, is safe<\/em>,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re doing a lot of different tests right now to evaluate both the safety and nutritional content of the microbial biomass. We\u2019re [also] working with the regulatory agency to see what we have to do in order to move toward that approval<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

If all goes to plan, Techtmann and his colleagues see their plastic waste-to-protein technology as another potential sustainable food source\u2014not unlike the current trend toward next generation animal-free proteins\u2014or an additive that could be enriched with additional vitamins, minerals, or other nutrients depending on the local needs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a big problem with plastic waste and it\u2019s going to take a lot of expertise, energy, and effort to come up with solutions<\/em>,\u201d said Techtmann. \u201cIf we can contribute to even a small part of helping to deal with this crisis, it\u2019s exciting to be working on something like this<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Are you enthusiastic about serving plastic food for dinner, for example?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

yogaesoteric
\nNovember 30, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DARPA-funded research seeks to tackle the climate crisis and global hunger by producing a protein powder from plastic and bacteria. Biologist Stephen Techtmann wants people to eat plastic. He isn\u2019t imagining anybody chowing down on Funko Pops, but rather plastic in a safer, palatable, powdered form you could swig after a grueling iron sesh at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[977],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-masonic-tendencies-in-contemporary-society-3480-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102511,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102506\/revisions\/102511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}