Each glass of orange juice leaves behind a huge pile of peels that either end up in the landfill or get burned. But what if this waste could be turned into plastic? Researchers from Cornell University, in a study titled 'One-Step Oxidation of Orange Peel Waste to Carbon Feedstock for Bacterial Production of Polyhydroxybutyrate,’ found a new way for achieving just this. They treated the orange peels with a chemical for an hour, extracted more than half of their sugar content, and used the residue to feed bacteria that produced PHB plastic.
The problem hiding in your fruit bowl
