How scientists turn plastic into foodfrom @kanekallaway

Transcript

Scientists just figured out how to turn plastic bottles into cookies. And these are real cookies that smell like vanilla and have protein and vitamins that humans can eat. The technology behind this is called Better. And the crazy part is NASA is actually paying for it. So their astronauts can turn their own trash into food on the way to Mars. It's pretty wild. Now the way this whole thing works is actually pretty interesting. Plastic and food are both made up of carbon molecules. So first, scientists shred the plastic bottles and blast them with super hot, ultra high pressure better. And this breaks them all the way down into molecules, basically a carbon soup. Here's where it gets interesting. They then then feed that soup to a type of yeast. This yeast is in the same family as the yeast that makes bread rise, except that this yeast is engineered to eat plastic instead of sugar. Now once the yeast eats the carbon molecules, what comes out the other side side are protein, fats, and vitamins. One strand of the yeast turns the carbon into vitamin a. Another one makes the vanilla. They then add fiber and sweetener and three d print the mixture into cookies. So what you're eating is not actually plastic, it's what the yeast made out of the plastic when it ate it. But the craziest part of this whole story is why NASA wants this technology in the first place. See, a round trip to Mars will take approximately three years, and there's no way to pack three years worth of food in a single spaceship. So in theory, this method is a way that astronauts could turn their trash into edible food on the journey. There's just one catch. Nobody's ever taste tested these plastic cookies before. The taste test is still waiting on FDA approval. But if this works, there's a good chance the first cookie ever eaten on Mars will have been made out of plastic.