Food waste has become a hot topic lately. We recently reported that 39 percent of Americans feel guilty about wasting food, yet in 2010 alone the U.S. wasted an astonishing 33 million tons of food. I’m no expert, but I’ve got to believe that most of our problem with wasting food comes from the fact that we have access to so much of it–and it’s relatively cheap.

Fast food restaurants and lots of highly-processed convenience food have muddled our perception of what food actually costs. Portion sizes have become huge, but almost totally devoid of nutrients. We figure “Hey, I only paid $1.99 for it, so what if I throw half away?” Now, Starbucks, itself a purveyor of this grab-and-go food, is working on a clever solution. Hong Kong locations of the coffee giant are recycling ingredients from expired baked goods and coffee grounds into chemicals for making plastics, laundry detergents and other ubiquitous products.

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The pilot project is the result of collaborations between Starbucks and researchers at the City University of Hong Kong. “Our new process addresses the food waste problem by turning Starbucks’ trash into treasure — detergent ingredients and bio-plastics that can be incorporated into other useful products,” said Carol S. K. Lin, Ph.D., who presented from the project at the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. “The strategy reduces the environmental burden of food waste, produces a potential income from this waste and is a sustainable solution.”

This food bio-refinery, as the researchers called it, uses black fungi to convert the baked goods’ carbohydrate bases into the simple sugars glucose and fructose. After adding a pinch of nitrogen, the sugary broth is stored in a vat to promote bacterial growth. Microbes feasting on the sugar produce succinic acid as their waste .It’s this byproduct that the researchers then strain out and crystallize into a white powder.

Recently succinic acid topped a U.S. Department of Energy list of 12 key materials that could be produced from sugars and that could be used to make high-value products ― everything from laundry detergents to bioplastics to medicines. Until then, Lin will have to wait for funding to test the process on a larger scale.