Artist Eleonora Ortolani, a student at design school Central Saint Martens, turned plastic waste into vanilla ice cream for her final-year project. Called ‘Guilty Flavors’, the formula basically consists of taking a small amount of plastic and then breaking that down into vanillin flavoring.
Vanillin is essentially the primary component of the vanilla bean and used in perfumes, fragrances, cleaning products as well as candles. In the food industry it is used to flavor chocolate, baked goods, and ice cream. Ortolani took the vanillin made from a small amount of plastic and used it in her own icy creation.
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Photo credit: Mael Henaff
If I tell you ‘there’s an ingredient in that ice-cream coming from plastic waste’, you’re going to be completely disgusted by it. But then once you understand that basically everything is part of the same ecosystem and we can even consider plastic part of the same ecosystem, then it makes total sense,” said Ortolani.