It might sound like a joke waiting for a punch line, but the question of, “how do you turn wastewater into candy wrappers?” has a simple answer: bacteria.According to a research team at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, a very specific, very hungry type of bacteria is converting industrial wastewater from the country’s largest chocolate plant into bioplastics. Those bioplastics can then be used to create candy wrappers and other practical applications.“We created an environment which allows a very peculiar group of organisms to thrive,” says biochemist Gerben Stouten at TEDxAmsterdam. “In a matter of hours [the bacteria]
