Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.

Here is the paper.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo4626

From the article.

>Plastic waste is clogging up our rivers and oceans and causing long-lasting environmental damage that is only just starting to come into focus. But a new approach that combines biological and chemical processes could greatly simplify the process of recycling it.

>...a new approach that uses a chemical process to break down mixed plastic waste into simpler chemical compounds before genetically modified bacteria convert them into a single, valuable end product could point the way to a promising new solution to our plastic crisis.

>This new hybrid technique, outlined in a recent paper in Science, builds upon previous research that showed that a mixture of different kinds of plastics could be broken down and converted into an array of useful chemicals by oxidizing them with the help of a catalyst.

The article then goes into a complex discussion of how certain genetically modified bacteria can apparently perform this "breakdown" of plastics into useful chemicals. But the article demonstrates the true promise of this technology.