this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
313 points (94.8% liked)
memes
22494 readers
3120 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not as bad as it sounds. PET plastic has the same atoms as sugar, so it's matter of reorganising it.
The researchers engineered an yeast that eats plastic and "ferments" it into sugar
NileRed on YouTube has done a few interesting things like turning plastic gloves into hot sauce through different chemical processes.
It's more of a fun science demonstration than anything meant to be even remotely practical to create food from waste, and there are some pretty nasty chemicals involved in some of them that really have no business being anywhere near food
But it does I think drive home the point that everything is basically made out of the same stuff and it's a matter of figuring out how to break it down and put it back together in the right way to be useful.
The alchemists were right, they just focused on the wrong area of the periodic table. We can't turn lead into gold, but we can turn plastic into mouthwatering hamburgers!
You can turn lead into gold; it was something that was demonstrated in my HS science class. It's just that the chemical used to make the change is far more valuable than the gold you get out of the process.
We've so far turned lead into gold 2 times
It's just so expensive it's not worth doing except to see if you can
It's also weirdly easiest to turn things much more radioactive but further away into gold, such as Osmium, but the gold that it produces is radioactive
We actually can turn lead into gold and fairly easily now, it's just that it would cost you billions of dollars to make pennies worth of gold.
steamed hams you say?
It's an old family recipe.
I thought we were having plastic bottles
Pressed hams
Actually we can turn lead into gold by shooting it with particle accelerators. It is not profitable though.