Would You Eat a Cookie Made From Upcycled Plastic? Scientists Propose a New Way to Deal With Waste and Provide Food in Extreme Environments

Researchers may have addressed three problems with one stone—or rather, one cookie. On August 24, a team presented µBites (pronounced “microbites”), edible cookies made from upcycled plastic, at the American Chemical Society Fall 2026 meeting in Chicago. They created the sweet treats by programming microbes to turn plastic and agricultural waste into proteins and flavoring molecules, adding some traditional food ingredients and then producing the cookies with a 3D printer.

The innovative snacks could one day come in handy during deep-space crewed missions or in disaster zones, and they could even help address world hunger. You have to use everything you have.” Jayakody and colleagues invented the cookies as a way to feed future Mars-bound astronauts as part of NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge, and they described their initial process in 2024 in the journal Trends in Biotechnology. It involves using water and oxygen at high temperature and pressure to turn carbon-based waste materials, including PET bottles and biomass like corn plant stalks, into smaller molecules.

Then, genetically engineered microbes, specifically different strains of yeast, munch on those pieces and transform them into nutrients including proteins, fats and acids. Adding fiber, starch and sweetener to the mixture results in a dough-like substance that can be extruded through a 3D printer, and voila—freshly printed protein-rich cookies. Quick fact: Other Deep Space Food Challenge projects In 2021, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency chose 38 teams that would each receive $25,000 to develop a proposed idea to feed astronauts on a long voyage.

Some winners of that phase included a project to create protein through gas fermentation and another to make ready-to-bake bread packaged in a multifunctional plastic bag. But the goods presented at the conference earlier this month went a step further. Since the original work, Sandhya Jayasekara, a microbiologist at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, has programmed yeasts to convert broken-down plastics and agricultural waste into even more cookie ingredients.

The microbes can now make vanillin, the chemical compound for the flavor and scent of vanilla, as well as beta-carotene, a nutrient in carrots and other fruits and vegetables that the body turns into vitamin A. Whether consumers are ready for this sort of food remains an open question. Vanilla flavoring might not be enough to get over the plastic hump, especially with more research finding microplastics in the human body, although scientists aren’t sure about the potential health effects.

Still, with the cookies, “it’s important to note that humans aren’t eating raw plastic,” Forbes reporter Mary Whitfill Roeloffs tells James Coomarasamy on the BBC’s “Global News Podcast.” The plastics are being broken down into nutritional molecules, which go into the food, she notes. Nevertheless, “I think that if I was in a disaster zone and didn’t have anything else to eat, that I would eat it, but I’m not sure I would pick it off the shelf over an Oreo.” For now, no one is eating the cookies. µBites are safe to eat, according to the researchers’ data, but the team still needs the institutional green light before they can carry out taste tests. So far, participants have sniffed the printed goods, which apparently smelled good.