Plastic Bottles Are Being 3D-Printed Into Edible Cookies, Yum?
One long-understood truth of environmental science is that plastic is not biodegradable. This is why recycling programs exist to begin with: both to protect the environment from harm and to save costs by reusing plastic and metals that don't need to be discarded in landfills, especially after only a single use. But what if you could take any common piece of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic (i.e. from a soda or water bottle) and turn it into a safe-to-eat cookie?
This is what researchers from SIU Carbondale Communications, funded by the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge and a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program grant, managed to pull off. They call the cookie "µBite," and it isn't simply the result of shredding and 3D printing existing plastic. Instead, PET plastic is put through a process called oxidative hydrothermal dissolution (OHD), which uses high-temperature, high-pressure water and oxygen to break...
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