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- Hacker News
- Interesting framing from the get-go:
> With billions of people experiencing hunger in 2025 and unable to afford a healthy diet, food insecurity remains a critical global challenge.
You know where this is headed.
by Hoasi - Let them eat plastic
- Assuming this works, now they just have to convince people to eat plastic
- I mean, aren't we all do that already?by sroussey
- Please don’t add the byproduct to my food, put it in the ground to decomposeby talon8635
- Your food is already 99% hydrocarbons.by userbinator
- even if you decompose it, plants uses the same during their growth.by shymaple
- If you don't eat your biomass compound goo, you can't have any PlastiYum bacterial sludgeby mbil
- by pibaker
- This keeps on re-emerging every year.
The primary issue that has consistently been a problem, is the cost.
by shevy-java - Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.by spockz
- There’s a fantastically silly but fun book about this the name of which eludes me.by piloto_ciego
- Why is that worrisome? Might give the fish a chance whose bellies are filling up with plastic rubbishby simmerup
- Timescale is the important bit. If organisms degrade plastics in a few hundred years then what plastics are uniquely valuable for will be quite fine indeed.by masklinn
- Perhaps soon you'll be needing to apply stains or sealants to your outdoor plastic items. Maybe even purchase treated plastic products that we worry leach toxic chemicals into their surroundings.by fc417fc802
- Reminds me of the Taumoeba escaping the Xenonite enclosures.by ryanisnan
- Usually these bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions in order to eat in this case ethylene glycol, not raw finished plastic. In this case they say "plastic-derived substrates" which means they're pre-processing the waste plastic.by ch4s3
- It will be interesting to see how much carbon dioxide is also created through this process.by nstents
- Yes totally agree, not just the carbon dioxide but other by products too.by shymaple
- soilent goo, again!
you, yes you, area "biomass compound", well maybe not quite yet, but soon, as these things go, but most definitly every last putrid smelly horrible thing is a "biomass compound", and when you add in plastic we are talking about most of the stuff found in millions of dumpsters, and most of the stuff actualy in dumps, or sewers.
This then solves the whole issue of what is allowed to go in which can or bin, which is anything you cant get money for or find someone who will hall it away for free.
I am very very sure that volunteers will soon show up wishing to "return to the great nutrient cycle"
but there is nothing to worry about as I am positive that everything will be tested and cynicly proven to be safe for human consumption
by metalman - Wasn't there a heinlein or dick story about some bacteria that evolved to eat all the paper so humanity couldn't have books anymore? Like everything is made of plastic, do we want it to start getting moldy?by ltbarcly3
- Isn’t this the plot of The Andromeda Strain?by zbentley
- Crimes of the Future also had people eating plastic bricksby Zoo3y
- No, the plot of The Andromeda Strain is about a low orbit bacterium that clots blood very quickly but is extremely sensitive to blood pH.
- > The researchers took PET plastic, discarded corn plant stalks and leaves, and other biomass and put it through a proprietary process called oxidative hydrothermal dissolution. Created by SIU Carbondale Geology Professor Ken Anderson, this method uses water and oxygen at high temperatures and pressures to break down tough material into microbe-accessible pieces. Then, those pieces are fed to the programmed yeasts, which transform them into a variety of new food ingredients, including proteins, fats and acids. Finally, the researchers add fiber, starch and sweetener to the mix and extrude it through a 3D printer, forming protein-rich cookies dubbed µBites (pronounced "microbites"). [https://phys.org/news/2026-08-yeasts-pet-plastic-crop-protei...]
It kind of sounds like they made food out of corn plant stalks and leaves and "other biomass", added fiber, starch, and sweetener, but then just polluted the product with processed waste plastic as an additive. If this really is just using trash as a filler in actual food that's pretty dystopian. I'm sure companies would happily line up to sell their industrial waste products to food companies as an additive, but I'm not seeing the appeal in this for consumers.
by autoexec - Vegetables grown in shit, garbage, and pesticides are fine as long as the levels of harmful residues are low enough by the time they reach people's mouths. Not appealing, but also not that "dystopian"by Sha1rholder
- Then, those pieces are fed to the programmed yeasts, which transform them into a variety of new food ingredients, including proteins, fats and acids
PET consists of repeating C10H8O4 monomers. Glucose is C6H12O6 and starch is a natural polymer containing it. It's not surprising that reactions can turn one into the other, along with other compounds containing hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen.
by userbinator - Is there any of this ”bacteria converting plastic to fuel/food/neutral stuff“ actually applied anywhere at scale under economically reasonably conditions?by waschl
- Not exactly these set of microbes(you will need to find the process). These authors used engineered microbes on a plastic derived substrate and not the plastic it self(PET).
To make a fuel or food or other stuff out of it you need to define the microbes set(mixture). Almost every study claiming plastic to X follows hybrid pattern, they break the polymer into smaller molecules by depolymerization either thermally/chemically for polyolefins like PE/PP/PS, since no enzyme is known to break a C-C backbone; enzymatically for ester-linked plastics like PET/PU, via PETase-type enzymes). Then it goes to the fermentation process, resulting small molecules into lipids (most common), PHA, or specific chemicals.
Sometimes a consortium(Mixture of microbes) is used, with different microbes handling different fractions of the breakdown mixture. Any "protein from plastic" claim is the same logic, the depolymerized substrate is just feeding an yeast, and the protein is the yeast biomass itself, harvested and used crude or extracted.
True microbial degradation of intact plastic polymers, no pretreatment, organism doing all the work, is still a challenging task for biologist.
by shymaple