 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 day){kind=link}
NEWS… BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT
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‘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.