NASA-Backed Project Turns Plastic Waste Into 3D-Printed Cookies

What if your cookie started life as a plastic bottle?

That question sits at the center of a new project from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Researchers there have engineered yeasts that consume PET plastic and corn waste, then convert it into protein-rich cookie dough that can be 3D-printed into edible treats. The work is funded by NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge, and it is as strange as it sounds.

The process starts with oxidative hydrothermal dissolution. Water and oxygen at high temperature and pressure break plastic bottles and plant stalks into carbon-rich molecules. Specialized yeasts then eat those molecules and produce proteins, fats, acids, and even vanilla flavoring. The team adds starch, fiber, and sweetener, extrudes the mixture through a 3D printer, and produces what they call µBites: micro-size protein cookies.

Why plastic

Plastic is carbon. Food is carbon. Associate Professor Lahiru Jayakody saw an obvious connection. The team chose PET because it is everywhere and it is loaded with carbon. Rather than using harsh solvents, they let microbes do the work. Yeast strains including Saccharomyces boulardii and Rhodosporidium toruloides were reprogrammed to crave the breakdown products of plastic and biomass. One strain now produces vanillin from plant waste. Another makes beta-carotene, a vitamin A precursor, from ethylene glycol.

Not quite ready for the grocery store

The cookies smell good. Panelists said they would eat them in resource-limited settings. But no one has taken a bite yet. Institutional approval for human taste testing is still pending. At roughly $60 per kilogram, the cost is also far from competitive with a regular cookie. Jayakody expects efficiency improvements and scale to bring that down. He hopes µBites could be ready for public consumption within a few years.

Where this actually matters

The immediate use case is extreme environments. Submarines, disaster zones, and Mars missions all share the same constraint: you cannot easily resupply food. If a yeast can turn trash into protein, that is a meaningful survival tool. On Earth, the dual problem of plastic pollution and food insecurity makes the chemistry relevant beyond space travel. Global food demand is projected to rise 35 to 56 percent by 2050. Turning waste streams into calories is one way to close that gap.

The team presented the work at the American Chemical Society fall meeting in Chicago. The original process was described in Trends in Biotechnology in 2024. The latest version adds flavor and nutrient improvements engineered directly into the yeast strains.