Recycling... and also nauseating!

 

This is one news story I would never have expected to read.

In a gleaming laboratory in Edinburgh, robotic machines whirr and mix. The final product that they are creating will be a pine-smelling chemical that can be used as an ingredient in perfumes. But the starting point is very different: a brown, gloopy, fat mixture, recently fished out from below ground - fatbergs.

Fatbergs are the foul phenomenon found lurking in (and blocking up) sewers. The development of the technology used to perform this apparent alchemy is being described by some as a new industrial revolution.

. . .

Prof Stephen Wallace from the University of Edinburgh is among those turning the fatbergs into perfumes. "It's a crazy idea," he admits to me, "but it works."

Fatbergs are accumulated lumps of fat from cooking oils, toilet and other food waste that people put down their drains. Prof Wallace gets his from a company that specialises in fishing them out of sewers and turning them into biofuels. They arrive at the lab in a tube.

The first step is to sterilise the material in a steamer. Prof Wallace then adds the specially modified bacteria to the remnants of the fatberg. The bacteria have a short section of DNA inserted, to give the bacteria their particular properties.

The fatberg gradually disappears, as the bacteria eat it, producing the chemical with the pine-like smell - this can be used as an ingredient in perfumes.

There's more at the link, including more maggot-gagging pollutant products that are being "reprocessed" into something useful.

Would you apply a perfume to your body that had started out as a fatberg?  I find the very concept repulsive . . . but I guess it's not much different from drinking recycled, purified sewer water, as millions of us do in many cities every day.  In this day and age, we have so much waste to dispose of that it makes sense to recycle and reuse it, rather than create even more pollution by dumping it somewhere.

Nevertheless, the thought of a fatberg being used as a perfume ingredient is about as cringe-worthy as anything I've ever heard!

Peter