Is there any of this ”bacteria converting plastic to fuel/food/neutral stuff“ actually applied anywhere at scale under economically reasonably conditions?
shymaple
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.
regularfry
Minor point, but a few years ago there was noise about waxworms being able to break down PE into ethylene glycol somehow, which would mean enzymatically breaking C-C bonds. No idea where that research ended up.
shymaple
Yes, you are correct. Waxworm saliva in combination with gut microbes can digest PE.
autoexec
> 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.
userbinator
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.
timcobb
Just because two substances are made of a similar distribution of atoms it doesn't mean much in terms of how one can be transformed effectively into the other...
mschuster91
> transformed effectively
Well that's where the yeast comes in, it does the work for us. And we desperately need ways to convert plastics into something that is not as durable, and ideally something we (or if that's too icky, farm animals) can eat afterwards.
gus_massa
Short answer: No
Long answer: Starch and cellulose are just chains of glucose connected in a slightly different way. But they have very different properties, you can split starch and get energy from it, but you can't split cellulose (unless you are a bacteria or fungus).
As far as I know, no life form can transform starch directly into cellulose, they have to split it and reconnect the glucose later. (And the reverse path is even harder.)
There are a few cases where the cells can transform the monomers inside the chains, in particular to make collagen, but the change is to replace some -H by -OH. Changing the Carbon structure is harder, almost impossible.
---
Back to the article: The yeast just split the plastic back into monomers (or probably short chains) and use the chains to build carotene (similar to vitamin A). It's quite similar to splinting starch or cellulose and using later the monomers. There is no polimer to polimer transformation.
Sha1rholder
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"
lazide
Good luck actually doing that, however.
Plenty of folks wishing to pretend though.
selfhoster1312
Using manure and compost as fertilizer is likely as old as agriculture (though i disagree using pesticides is fine). What did you mean?
lazide
Plenty of substances bio accumulate, and being less than careful with animal waste as fertilizer causes outbreaks and disease.
selfhoster1312
Ha yes of course, this is obvious to anyone in the field but always a good idea to repeat. For example, do not use human feces as fertilizer for food you'll eat (at least not directly).
lazide
Ack, yeah it's one of those 'well duh', until people who have no idea blindly copy the idea and then plague, or prions, or arsenic poisoning, or whatever.
zbentley
Isn’t this the plot of The Andromeda Strain?
MathMonkeyMan
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.
euroderf
oh, spoiler.
Zoo3y
Crimes of the Future also had people eating plastic bricks
shymaple
With gut microbes handling the plastic degradation to proteins? :-D
Hoasi
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.
closingreunion
Let them eat plastic
nstents
It will be interesting to see how much carbon dioxide is also created through this process.
shymaple
Yes totally agree, not just the carbon dioxide but other by products too.
metalman
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
DarmokTanagra
Soylent Green is plastic!
talon8635
Please don’t add the byproduct to my food, put it in the ground to decompose
shymaple
even if you decompose it, plants uses the same during their growth.
talon8635
That’s fine. Make it plant food, not human food. I’ll trust the food a plant produces by consuming this than eating it directly myself. There’s a filtering layer in ther
userbinator
Your food is already 99% hydrocarbons.
shevy-java
This keeps on re-emerging every year.
The primary issue that has consistently been a problem, is the cost.
spockz
Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
ch4s3
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.
cortesoft
Good thing microorganisms are famous for their slow rate of change in dynamic environments…
ch4s3
I'm not sure what this adds. The yeast here is chomping ethylene glycol for carbon, and tons of soil bacteria can already do that. And I should add that highly specialized industrial/lab yeasts have existed for a long time and aren't prevalent in the environment, they just don't like to grow outside of narrow(ish) conditions. Highly prevalent wild yeasts tend to eat a variety of sugars, not glycol.
golem14
>Usually these bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions in order to eat
Until, say, they mutate independently. Now, I have no idea how likely that is, but I think the fear is not baseless. There's a fun SF book, "Directive 51", which explores this a bit. Not a bad book to cuddle up with.
ch4s3
Yeast drift a little but aren’t picking up new metabolic pathways very readily. Moreover these yeast don’t eat plastic they eat a component of PET in a bioreactor.
tantalor
Of course, the lysine contingency.
shevy-java
> bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions
In a natural environment this will not hold. Organisms are unstable; they change all the time, simpler ones even more so. Mutants with a faster growth rate will, up to a certain maximum, take over from slower growing or growth-deficient mutants. There isn't really a compelling growth advantage for plastic-degrading organisms, which is one reason why plastic stays so long in the environment.
All pre-processing steps further add to the cost, so we will year after year hear about it - and then wonder why nothing happens and plastics keep compounding in the ocean. And this is not new either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Chakrabarty
bryanrasmussen
>In a natural environment this will not hold. Organisms are unstable; they change all the time, simpler ones even more so.
Jurassic narratives notwithstanding, unsure if this is a real problem. If you have a yeast that will only survive under narrow unnatural circumstances, I would expect freeing it into the wild with natural circumstances means it dies - not uses nature to find a way to destroy the world as a form of poetic justice for ever having been created.
ch4s3
People who have never worked with anything biology related love to spout off about Jurassic Park. As a brewer I can assure you all that fancy special purpose yeasts just don’t turn into other stuff readily and often lose their modifications when they interact with wild yeasts.
bryanrasmussen
Are you perhaps misreading what I wrote, or am I misreading what you wrote? My reading of what you wrote makes me think you are interpreting me as claiming special purpose yeasts turn into other stuff readily, etc. etc.
on edit: my confusion stems from being the first to reference anything Jurassic in the conversation, so you sound somewhat accusatory.
ch4s3
I was agreeing with you and tossing in my own 2¢.
bryanrasmussen
OK cool, sorry had a rough night of only a couple hours sleep so wasn't sure.
ryanisnan
Reminds me of the Taumoeba escaping the Xenonite enclosures.
phoronixrly
Yeah, that was for plot reasons...
fc417fc802
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.
SoftTalker
You already do if they sit in the sun. The UV light breaks down plastic pretty quickly.
masklinn
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.
simmerup
Why is that worrisome? Might give the fish a chance whose bellies are filling up with plastic rubbish
serf
for all the reasons in the book/movie/television show 'The Andromeda Strain'.
piloto_ciego
There’s a fantastically silly but fun book about this the name of which eludes me.
stevekemp
Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters, a 1971 British sci-fi environmental disaster novel written by medical scientist Kit Pedler and television screenwriter Gerry Davis.
That wasn’t it; I just found it, it’s called Ill Wind by Kevin J Anderson
mocheeze
Not plastic, but 'Cats Cradle' by Kurt Vonnegut has something kind of like that.
righthand
Such as in The Andromeda Strain?
weaksauce
there was a time in history before fungus came along and ate trees so there were just a huge amount of trees around that couldn't decay. (which is why we have coal actually) this could be something akin to that.
patwolf
I've heard that the prevailing theory now is that it wasn't the lack of fungus that made coal. Instead, the earth was covered in tropical wetlands, and trees couldn't decay in the anoxic water.
SoftTalker
No termites either.
mbil
If you don't eat your biomass compound goo, you can't have any PlastiYum bacterial sludge
Didn't that happen in Andromeda Strain? The de-polymerized polymer?
King-Aaron
"Even that sandwich you're eating is made from old, recycled sandwiches!"
thisisauserid
In 2011 researchers identified a fungus named pestalotiopsis microspora. It gained widespread attention because it can digest polyurethane plastic and survive entirely in anaerobic conditions, making it a prime candidate for deployment at the bottom of landfills.
I for one look forward to serving this underground deity.
axiologist
Soylent Green?
aussieguy1234
Assuming this works, now they just have to convince people to eat plastic
sroussey
I mean, aren't we all do that already?
KellyCriterion
There was a paper some month ago, showing that (through biopsie) that most people have around 8 - 10g of microplastic in their brain (thats around 1.5 - 2 standard credit cards)
Melatonic
We're reaching new heights of neuro-plasticity
I'm not sure if that's a dad joke or the microplastics in my brain telling me it is
nephihaha
It explains a lot.
ltbarcly3
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?
londons_explore
Someone needs to figure out how to convert mineral oil into food.
If it could be done, we solve world hunger overnight.
Oddly many countries explicitly have a law that such a thing is forbidden. I wonder it it was preemptively protecting farmers?
There are a few problems with turning oil into single cell protein:
- Microorganisms have small cells that reproduce quickly, which means a lot of nucleic acids in the dry mass, which is trouble for animals (including humans) that can't tolerate a very high purine level in the diet.
- The abundant cell walls of microorganisms also can cause illness when they're a high proportion of dietary intake.
- Feeding single cell protein directly to people has to overcome traditions of cuisine, even in cases where it doesn't actually make people sick. Indirect usage of SCP (e.g. feeding it to salmon, and then having people eat salmon) can overcome that hurdle, but then the cost per human-edible calorie goes up too.
nephihaha
Solein? Even sounds like "Soylent".
joegibbs
In WW2 Germany invented a way to convert coal into an edible, butter-like substance. I think it was very inefficient though (70 to 1 input/output ratio).
This is a bit nonsensical. How is doing chemistry to mineral oil to turn it into some other hydrocarbon sludge with mediocre nutrition more effective than the stupid hydrocarbon sludge we already have: Corn syrup?
Again, the ONLY reason there is still anyone, anywhere, who suffers from not enough food, is because people in the richest country on earth aren't even willing to spend a few million sending support to extremely needy countries.
Instead, we take a huge fraction of our entire corn crop, turn it into ethanol, and burn it. The primary reason we do it is to waste corn, so that corn prices are higher. We purposely make food more expensive, as a kickback to some real assholes.
World hunger could have been solved a century ago. No technology is required. Zero. At least until we have to figure out a reasonable way to make fertilizers more sustainable.
You know petroleum is actually expensive for a commodity, right? For the price of one barrel of oil, you could get an entire ton of iron ore, 0.8 tons of coal, 20 bushels of corn (about 1000-1200 pounds), 500 pounds of milk, 500 pounds of refined sugar, etc. Petroleum is an input to agriculture, but it enables staggering yield outputs per gallon of input. No amount of chemistry can ever compete with that for simple thermodynamics reasons.
Mechanized agriculture is so efficient that if you leave it to it's own devices it simply bankrupts itself every other year from oversupply. Damn near every functioning country artificially increases the price of basic agricultural commodities to ensure farms are stable. It's a massive handout to a cohort of people that nowadays are basically just very wealthy capital owners, but it also was the actual solution to famine, at least inside those countries.
SoftTalker
The rich countries already send enough food to the poorer countries. The problem is their despotic and corrupt governments don't distribute it to the people who need it.
manoDev
So called “rich countries” don’t even have food self-sufficiency. The only countries near that goal today are China, Vietnam, Brazil a close second.
fearmerchant
The USA is food self sufficient if your definition is having enough calories to survive.
nephihaha
Depends which ones. Some rich countries like New Zealand are food exporters.
goryramsy
I couldn’t find anything about this in a cursory google search, do you have any more information or links on this?
manyatoms
is there a lot of mineral oil out there? what motivates the suggestion of this particular precursor?
hkt
Honestly at this point I think the way to go may be to stop using plastics where they're not absolutely required, and to subsequently burn what goes into landfill while producing electricity and reclaiming heat. Better that than this.
fc417fc802
Burn it? With all the talk of carbon capture? Recall that plastic literally consists of a mass of hydrocarbons. Why not bury it?
hkt
I'd argue that if we are burning plastics we get to dodge microplastics, and we get a second use of hydrocarbons. Burn enough plastic, maybe we can displace some gas. Optimistic, I realise.
bluebarbet
One problem is that plastic generally contains all manner of additives which create a health hazard when burned. Incinerators supposedly filter out the dangerous pollutants, but it seems likely that quite a lot gets into the air. For some of these chemicals we know that tiny concentrations, much smaller than previously thought, are enough to be dangerous. The safest approach IMO is ground sequestration. And of course much better regulation of plastic additives.
axus
I think the legitimate answer was groundwater contamination, but that should be solved for other things we bury. I'm on board for non-biodegradable plastic trash sequestration
Loughla
How do you define 'not absolutely required'?
hkt
Easy cases might be single use plastics outside of a medical environment and anything where there isn't a substitute with adequate properties (I'd ignore economics here and let the market solve)
Ultimately a tricky thing to define though, no argument.
BigTTYGothGF
> let the market solve
That's how we got here in the first place.
CrzyLngPwd
Yummy, can't wait to spread the packing on my plastic bread /s
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.
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.
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.
Well that's where the yeast comes in, it does the work for us. And we desperately need ways to convert plastics into something that is not as durable, and ideally something we (or if that's too icky, farm animals) can eat afterwards.
Long answer: Starch and cellulose are just chains of glucose connected in a slightly different way. But they have very different properties, you can split starch and get energy from it, but you can't split cellulose (unless you are a bacteria or fungus).
As far as I know, no life form can transform starch directly into cellulose, they have to split it and reconnect the glucose later. (And the reverse path is even harder.)
There are a few cases where the cells can transform the monomers inside the chains, in particular to make collagen, but the change is to replace some -H by -OH. Changing the Carbon structure is harder, almost impossible.
---
Back to the article: The yeast just split the plastic back into monomers (or probably short chains) and use the chains to build carotene (similar to vitamin A). It's quite similar to splinting starch or cellulose and using later the monomers. There is no polimer to polimer transformation.
Plenty of folks wishing to pretend though.
> 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.
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
The primary issue that has consistently been a problem, is the cost.
Until, say, they mutate independently. Now, I have no idea how likely that is, but I think the fear is not baseless. There's a fun SF book, "Directive 51", which explores this a bit. Not a bad book to cuddle up with.
In a natural environment this will not hold. Organisms are unstable; they change all the time, simpler ones even more so. Mutants with a faster growth rate will, up to a certain maximum, take over from slower growing or growth-deficient mutants. There isn't really a compelling growth advantage for plastic-degrading organisms, which is one reason why plastic stays so long in the environment.
All pre-processing steps further add to the cost, so we will year after year hear about it - and then wonder why nothing happens and plastics keep compounding in the ocean. And this is not new either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Chakrabarty
Jurassic narratives notwithstanding, unsure if this is a real problem. If you have a yeast that will only survive under narrow unnatural circumstances, I would expect freeing it into the wild with natural circumstances means it dies - not uses nature to find a way to destroy the world as a form of poetic justice for ever having been created.
on edit: my confusion stems from being the first to reference anything Jurassic in the conversation, so you sound somewhat accusatory.
No wikipedia page, but goodreads has it here:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99852816-mutant-59
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomwatch#Series_One
I for one look forward to serving this underground deity.
I'm not sure if that's a dad joke or the microplastics in my brain telling me it is
If it could be done, we solve world hunger overnight.
Oddly many countries explicitly have a law that such a thing is forbidden. I wonder it it was preemptively protecting farmers?
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/11/10/archives/soviet-plant-to-...
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP91T01115R0001000...
The term to search for is "single cell protein."
There are newer approaches to making single cell protein from carbon dioxide and renewable energy instead of fossil oil, like Solein:
https://www.solein.com/
There are a few problems with turning oil into single cell protein:
- Microorganisms have small cells that reproduce quickly, which means a lot of nucleic acids in the dry mass, which is trouble for animals (including humans) that can't tolerate a very high purine level in the diet.
- The abundant cell walls of microorganisms also can cause illness when they're a high proportion of dietary intake.
- Feeding single cell protein directly to people has to overcome traditions of cuisine, even in cases where it doesn't actually make people sick. Indirect usage of SCP (e.g. feeding it to salmon, and then having people eat salmon) can overcome that hurdle, but then the cost per human-edible calorie goes up too.
Again, the ONLY reason there is still anyone, anywhere, who suffers from not enough food, is because people in the richest country on earth aren't even willing to spend a few million sending support to extremely needy countries.
Instead, we take a huge fraction of our entire corn crop, turn it into ethanol, and burn it. The primary reason we do it is to waste corn, so that corn prices are higher. We purposely make food more expensive, as a kickback to some real assholes.
World hunger could have been solved a century ago. No technology is required. Zero. At least until we have to figure out a reasonable way to make fertilizers more sustainable.
You know petroleum is actually expensive for a commodity, right? For the price of one barrel of oil, you could get an entire ton of iron ore, 0.8 tons of coal, 20 bushels of corn (about 1000-1200 pounds), 500 pounds of milk, 500 pounds of refined sugar, etc. Petroleum is an input to agriculture, but it enables staggering yield outputs per gallon of input. No amount of chemistry can ever compete with that for simple thermodynamics reasons.
Mechanized agriculture is so efficient that if you leave it to it's own devices it simply bankrupts itself every other year from oversupply. Damn near every functioning country artificially increases the price of basic agricultural commodities to ensure farms are stable. It's a massive handout to a cohort of people that nowadays are basically just very wealthy capital owners, but it also was the actual solution to famine, at least inside those countries.
Ultimately a tricky thing to define though, no argument.
That's how we got here in the first place.