Butter comes from cows, right? Well, a new startup is churning butter out of thin air — and it has the financial support of none other than Bill Gates.
The ground-breaking company, Savor, developed a process that takes carbon pollution from the air and turns it into butter, according to Interesting Engineering. But this butter is more than an oil-based replication of real butter, like current plant-based alternatives on the market. Savor's butter is chemically the same as "traditional" dairy butter.
Here's how it works: All fat molecules, including those in butter, are made of chains of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. Savor works in a lab to make the same fat molecules found in butter from air — without harming animals or plants in the process. And the process actually benefits the environment, turning pollution into product and avoiding the environmental impacts of dairy production.
"We start with a source of carbon, like carbon dioxide, and use a little bit of heat and hydrogen to form chains which are then blended with oxygen from air to make the fats and oils we know, love, and drool over," Savor explains on its website. "That's how we get rich, delightful ingredients without animal suffering, palm plantations, or dangerous chemicals. All in the most efficient, most resilient, least polluting way known to science."
The dairy and meat industry is a significant source of polluting gases in our environment. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that dairy and meat farming account for 14.5% of human-caused, toxic pollution in our atmosphere.
Savor butter is estimated to have a significantly lower carbon footprint than animal-based butter. According to the Guardian, Savor's butter could net less than 0.8 grams of CO2 equivalent per calorie. Real unsalted butter with 80% fat comes in at 2.4 grams of CO2 equivalent per calorie.
This potential environmental impact caught Gates' attention. He is a major investor in the company and has tried the butter himself.
"The process doesn't release any greenhouse gasses, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does," Gates recently wrote on his blog. "And most important, it tastes really good — like the real thing, because chemically, it is."
While Savor has butter down, the company plans to soon replicate milk, ice cream, cheese, meat, and cooking oils — including environmentally taxing palm oil — with the process.
But it may be a little while before you see Savor's innovative butter on store shelves. The company tells the Guardian it is working through regulatory approval before hitting the consumer market.
Savor chief executive Kathleen Alexander told the Guardian: "We are not expecting to be able to move forward with any kind of sales until at least 2025."
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