UPDATE: This lecture has been postponed. For updates on a new date, visit the SLAC Public Lecture website.

From our kitchens to our clothes to the delivery of medicines, plastics play an indispensable role in our daily lives. But, the end-life of these plastics is not always taken into account. Few types of plastics can be readily recycled, and durable plastics take centuries to break down in landfills or in the environment. Here at SLAC, we are designing chemical processes that can break down plastics under controlled conditions while also making useful products. Using X-ray light, we observe the details of this breakdown at the atomic level and use this information to design pathways for the degradation of plastics into useful products. We are members of a consortium that aims to make tomorrow's plastics recyclable and biodegradable by design. In this lecture, I will describe my work on visualizing and improving our methods for breaking down plastic waste into useful products.