Food waste is more than just the starting material for compost. From dried-up beet pulp to millipede-digested coconut fibers, scientists are finding treasure in our trash. Four recent papers published in ACS journals detail how food waste contains sustainable solutions for farming and new sources of bioactive compounds for pharmaceuticals.

Lots of single-use water bottles made from poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) end up in landfills, but there’s a growing interest in upcycling them instead. Researchers in ACS’ Energy & Fuels report on new heat-based fabrication methods to transform PET into supercapacitor electrodes and separator films for upcycled energy storage devices. In demonstrations, an all-plastic supercapacitor made from discarded water bottles outperformed a similar design that used a traditional glass fiber separator.

On behalf of the American Chemical Society (ACS), President Dorothy J. Phillips congratulates today’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan; Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia; and Omar M. Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley, U.S. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to Kitagawa, Robson and Yaghi equally “for the development of metal-organic frameworks.” 

American Chemical Society (ACS) President Dorothy J. Phillips will issue a statement on the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry after the official announcement is made from Stockholm on Wednesday, Oct. 8. Many past winners of the chemistry prize have been ACS members and authors of research papers published in ACS’ suite of more than 90 peer-reviewed scientific journals.