Vanilla extract is a very valuable commodity that is used worldwide for cooking, particularly in the manufacturing of sweets and confectionaries. Yet as the demand rises, there has been a problem of meeting demand with supply. Yet researchers at the University of Edinburgh have found the world’s first useful way to convert plastic waste, and that is through genetically modified microbes that can produce vanillin from plastic waste.
Until now, vanillin was exclusively a byproduct of vanilla bean extract, a naturally occurring crop. Plastic waste took awhile to decompose, so by curbing the looming shortage of vanillin for food products, researchers came up with a creative way to reduce plastic waste at the same time.
Vanillin as a spice and a market is expected to reach a value of $724.5 million globally by the year 2025, and supply is begin to shorten. It is used in a variety of consumer goods, such as soda, cosmetics and dairy products. While vanillin is typically distilled from the vanilla bean, there is a synthetic version that can be made through an industrial process. The overwhelming majority of the world’s vanillin, around 85 percent, is synthesized using a two step process that utilizes fossil fuels, according to the Independent. Vanillin is already being produced artificially in order to meet the shortage of supply that vanilla bean extract itself is not in sufficient abundance to meet.
The economic impact of plastic waste can be seen through the $110 billion global loss due to single use plastic losing 95 percent of it’s value after the first use, according to USA Today. The Guardian also reports that for every million plastic bottles that are produced, only 14 percent are being recycled.
Studies in the past have shown that enzymes possess the capability to break down polyethylene terephthalate, abbreviated as PET, into terephthalic acid, abbreviated as TA. Using this research as a baseline, researchers at the university were able to use a modified version of the Escherichia coli or E.coli bacteria, in order to initiate a conversion from the acid into vanillin.
The researchers then proceeded to mix these E.coli together in a soup with TA, heating it up to a temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit for a duration of about 24 hours, according to the Guardian. The concoction then converted 79 percent of the TA into vanillin. Due to the similarity of both chemical compounds, the microbes were able to accomplish this transformation. All the bacteria are required to do in order for this transformation to happen is change the number of hydrogen and oxygen atoms bonded to the acid’s carbon ring, according to Live Science.
Ellis Crawford, a medicinal chemist and editor at the journal Royal Society of Chemistry, is quoted commenting on this discovery: “By utilizing microbes to transform waste plastics, which are in themselves harmful to the environment, we can create an important commodity and platform molecule with a wide spectrum of applications in cosmetics and food products, and is a beautiful demonstration of green chemistry.”
Future studies are being planned with the aim of increasing the amount of TA being converted into vanillin and for the scalability of the process so that greater quantities of plastic waste can be converted at a time so it becomes industrially and commercially viable, according to the Guardian.
As for as numbers go, the global demand for vanillin was 37,000 metric tons in 2018, and this is expected to increase to 59,000 metric tons by 2025, as per a study conducted by the journal Green Chemistry.