Plastic trash lining a mountain trail might not seem like the start of a chemistry breakthrough, but for Yuwei Gu, it was. Hiking through Bear Mountain State Park in New York, the Rutgers chemist saw plastic bottles scattered along the path and floating in a lake. In such a quiet place, the waste felt loud. Nature fills every living thing with polymers, from DNA and RNA to proteins and cellulose. Those natural chains do their jobs and then break down. Synthetic plastics, made from different chemistry, tend to stay put for decades. That contrast hit Gu in the middle of the woods. “Biology uses polymers everywhere, such as proteins, DNA, RNA and cellulose, yet nature never faces the kind of long-term accumulation problems we see with synthetic plastics,” said Gu, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. Standing among the trees, a simple idea surfaced in his mind: “The difference has to lie in chemistry.” Design concept for polymer self-deconstruction driven by CPNGs. …