The sweet smell of excess: how fatbergs make perfume

Have you ever walked past a sewage plant and thought the stench hanging in the air would be just perfect to spray over yourself before a big night out?

Soon you might be doing something very similar because the stinking fatbergs that lurk in our sewers can now be transformed into "beautiful perfumes", said the Daily Mail.

'Nightmares from the sewers'

Fatbergs are "some of the foulest-smelling things imaginable": huge "blobs" of "toilet waste", such as wet wipes, used condoms and sanitary products, "all held together by a congealed mass of fat and grease" from cooking oils people pour down the sink. The biggest fatbergs can grow to be several tonnes in weight, blocking up the sewage system and causing backed-up drains and flooding.

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One of the largest fatbergs ever recorded was the "Whitechapel Fatberg". It was as long as London Bridge and weighed 130 tonnes. It cost £220,000 to remove.

Thames Water alone spends £18 million every year to clear "these monstrosities" from the sewers. Once found, fatbergs are usually incinerated or sent to landfill, where they "leak noxious chemicals" into the ground, said the BBC.

But now scientists have found a way to turn these revoltingly ugly ducklings into fresh-smelling swans. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh are transforming the "nightmares from the sewers" into a "fragrant oil" with the "scent of pine needles", said the Mail.

'Crazy but it works'

The fatbergs are sent to the research team by a company that "specialises in fishing them out of sewers", said the BBC. They arrive at the lab in a tube and are sterilised in a steamer. Then specially modified bacteria are added, and each fatberg "gradually disappears, as the bacteria eat it", producing a "pine-like smell" that can be used as an ingredient in perfumes. "It's a crazy idea but it works," lead researcher Professor Stephen Wallace told the broadcaster.

There could be even better news for our noses, said the Mail, because it's possible that the same bacteria could be "released into sewage plants", where they can "break down fatbergs and leave the sewers smelling better than ever".

And it's not just fatberg transformation that this technology can make happen. The University of Edinburgh's hub has also created bugs that change used plastics into vanilla essence, extract vital metals from burnt-out batteries, and turn waste-water from whisky distillation into a plant-based alternative to fish-oil health supplements. The "possibilities are endless", said the BBC, but they all "require funding".

The UK is at the leading edge of this technology. And if it can "scale up", the "appetite for investment appears to be there". But advances are being made elsewhere in the world at "breakneck speed", leaving our leading role "insecure".

The technology was "set as a national priority" by the Conservative government in December 2023 but the new Labour administration has not yet made a "firm spending commitment". A House of Lords report released this month warned that "other countries are beginning to overtake the UK", and "we are at severe risk" of "losing the prospective benefits of a world-leading engineering biology sector".