Worldwide industrial and household food waste amounts to hundreds of billions of pounds per year, a large proportion of which comprises edible scraps, like fruit and vegetable peels.

This unsustainable practice is both costly and environmentally unfriendly, so researchers have been searching for new ways to recycle these organic materials into useful products.

"Our goal was to use seaweed and common food scraps to construct materials that were at least as strong as concrete," explains Yuya Sakai, the senior author of the study.

"But since we were using edible food waste, we were also interested in determining whether the recycling process impacted the flavor of the original materials."