Components of chocolate, whipped cream and peanut butter have been used to synthesize an oil spill dispersant more sustainable than products available today.

The research is meant to address concerns arising from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, when a record amount of chemicals with unknown long-term ecological and health effects were pumped into the ocean. Dispersants work by surrounding hydrocarbons to form tiny droplets of oil that can be easily degraded by oil-eating microbes.

The chemicals are usually added to the ocean surface to keep oil from washing up on the coast, but the scale of the Macondo well spill necessitated 771,000 gallons of dispersants to be pumped directly at the well 5,067 feet below the sea.

It is unclear whether deep-sea injection of dispersants actually worked, because scientists did not have the technology to monitor the process at such depths. Studies have suggested the dispersants sank to the ocean floor, and traces of the undegraded chemicals were found 200 miles from the Macondo well after two months.

The new dispersant, developed by researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi, may do away with such doubts in the future.

The dispersant is made entirely of components found in food products. And it carries hydrocarbon droplets up the water column to the ocean surface, where the droplets can either be degraded by microbes or collected by ships, said Lisa Kemp, a researcher at the university.

The dispersant is also not sticky, which means birds cannot be coated by the oil.

"Birds can sit in slicks of the dispersed oil, they can dive through it and take off and flap their wings, and the oil will fall off," Kemp said in a statement.

It uses a polymer similar to the ones in laundry detergents that wrap up dirt and take it down the drain.

The dispersant is no more expensive to manufacture than others available on the market, and the group is currently scaling up its pilot, Kemp said. Its work has not yet been published in a scientific journal.