It’s not a hoax, a British design student has managed to make vanilla ice cream from plastic waste.
In collaboration with several researchers, Eleonora Ortolani was able to modify plastic molecules to transform them into synthetic vanilla flavor, a way for her to “reconcile plastic pollution and food insecurity”.
The research team, which was inspired by wax worms, for which an enzyme present in their saliva helps digest plastic materials, designed an enzyme integrated into the E. Coli bacteria in the human digestive system in order to unbind plastic molecules.
With the injection of this enzyme, the researchers obtained vanillin, the synthetic flavor of vanilla, which they integrated into an ice cream base to take the form of vanilla ice cream, according to what “Ouest-France” reported.
Even if the vanillin obtained from this experiment is indeed edible, other tests are nevertheless necessary to develop this new plastic ice cream on a large scale, according to the magazine “Dezeen”.
“This is the first example of using a biological system to recycle plastic waste into an industrial chemical,” said Joanna Salder, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh.