Student plays long game by making ice cream humans may eat in thousands of years

‘Life in plastic, it’s fantastic,’ as goes the adage of old.

But a British artist is making Aqua’s Barbie Girl song a reality with the first food ever made from plastic waste – mainly because plastic isn’t really fantastic, to be honest.

While it’s not quite a two-floor plastic pink mansion with a swimming pool, London designer Eleonora Ortolani’s plastic ice cream is the next best thing.

(Though, given rising rents and mortgage payments these days, maybe we’d take the mansion too.)

Ortolani, a student at the London art and design college Central Saint Martins, made the confection for her art installation, Guilty Flavours.

She says she made the ‘vanilla ice cream’ from vanillin – the extract of the vanilla bean used as a chemical to make pharmaceuticals and cleaning products.

The artist says she locked up the sweet treat in a freezer to bring a focus to the looming food crisis amid climate change (Picture: Reuters)

But she didn’t go around grabbing a can of vanilla beans from her local Tescos. Ortolani worked with scientists to convert used plastic bottles into vanillin.

‘Guilty Flavours is what I believe is the first sample of ice cream made from plastic waste,’ the Verona, Italy, local told Reuters.

‘It’s coming from the same plastic as we can find in bottles, plastic bottles.’

Scottish scientists developed mutant enzymes in 2021 that can gobble up the polyethene terephthalate polymer used for drink bottles into its basic unit, terephthalic acid (TA).

Thinking this was a rather cool idea, Ortolani enlisted the help from one of the researchers involved, Dr Joanna Sadler, a biotechnologist from the University of Edinburgh.

Plastic, Dr Sadler says, is one long chain of tough molecules called synthetic polymers.

Eleonora Ortolani says it’s the world’s first vanilla ice cream derived from plastic waste (Picture: Reuters)

Cheap and durable, plastic is these days found in everything from staws and cotton bud sticks to cigarette filters and coffee cup lids.

But as much as these products tend to be disposable, these stubborn polymers weren’t designed for that. Some plastics take hundreds of years to decompose, loitering in landfills and drifting into the bellies of marine life.

Dr Sadler, however, uses her peckish microbe to break the bonds and leave behind a PET-soup that engineered E coli bacteria then transform into vanillin.

‘Once you break down the plastics, in this case PET, once you break it down into its building blocks, we call those monomers, you can turn those into many, many different things,’ says Dr Sadler.

Though Ortolani’s idea seems like a scoop, people won’t be able to scream for plastic ice cream anytime soon. (Nor does it look like we’ll have a Flake made from plastic waste to go with our plastic 99.)

‘I’ve even had members of the public email me saying it’s irresponsible to encourage people to eat plastic,’ Dr Sadler said.

As you can guess, you probably won’t find the plastic ice cream at your local grocers just yet (Picture: Reuters)

‘It is really important that we take the safety side of it really, really seriously and we make it very clear that this has to go through exactly the same regulatory processes and food standard processes as any other food ingredient.

‘And only once it has been through all of those would it go anywhere near any kind of consumer product.’

Plastic production, Ortolani adds, is increasing – and the plastic recycling system is struggling to keep up with it.

In 1950, about 2,000,000 tons of plastic were produced – in 2021, the amount has swelled to more than 390,000,000, according to the Plastic Atlas Asia Edition.

Of the 1,00,000 plastic bottles sold every minute around the world, according to the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, just 14% are recycled. 

The environmental impacts of plastic buildup and the declining popularity of the material have left Ortolani ‘frustrated’.

The confectionery was made by gobbling up what bonds the parts of plastic, called polymers, together (Picture: Reuters)

Some are hoping to ban single-use plastics, while others hope to make plastic that essentially has a self-destruct button.

But neither is a silver bullet for not only the problem of plastic waste, as Ortolani stresses, but the looming global food crisis amid climate change.

‘We have the tools today to rethink the food system we’re living in,’ she said, adding that she had her locked up Guilty Pleasures in a freezer to highlight this.

‘This is ready now and today but nobody can really touch it or interact with it because it’s not tested for safety yet.’

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