 The common misunderstanding with things that are marked as compostable or biodegradable is that maybe, hey, this is kind of like a banana peel or an apple core. Most people assume that plastics like the ones I'm holding, which are branded on the market as compostable or biodegradable, then you can just throw them in your backyard or when you're on a hike, just throw them in a bush and they'll degrade over time. That's not true. When you do that, it'll take many, many years to wait before anything will happen and even then, it'll break down to microplastics, which will pollute our environments and our bodies. What our team has done here at our lab is that we've found a way to put enzymes, which are things in bacteria, that will actually break down these plastics. We put them inside our plastic and now they're much more easily degradable, either in home compost or in industrial compost solutions or even in water that's heated up and when they break down, they don't result in any microplastics. We use this microscope to take a really deep look into what our film actually looks like at the nanoscopic scale. The black dots shown here are actually our enzymes and you can see how they're nice and dispersed all across the film and that's what we like to see and this shows that the enzymes do not actually clump together but are nicely spread apart, which allows for them to be degraded even when they're in the microplastic scale. We see that the black dots are nice and spaced apart so little bits of microplastics will still have enzymes in them, actively eating them apart. To decompose the plastic, simply put your plastic bags into warm water, leave it for days to weeks and it'll break down into the individual building blocks of the plastic such that these can actually be collected and remade into new plastics. So this pink polymer I have here is called our Random Heteropolymer or RHP for short and it is the special secret ingredient in our truly compostable plastics that we use to protect the enzymes that are inside our plastics that eat it and make it compostable. What we do to mix it with the enzymes and to form that protective layer is we first have to dissolve it in water, which I do overnight, which allows me to then mix it with the enzymes which are also in water. The reason we have a plastic problem is because plastics are really great, they're used in all kinds of medical applications, I think it can save lives in terms of helmets and other things like that. So if we can present a solution of a truly compostable plastic, hopefully we can then actually start to phase out fossil fuel-based plastics and make these biodegradable plastics with our added protected enzymes in it more widespread for use. One thing I'm super excited about going forward is seeing how this technology works its way into the market, where's its first use going to be? We don't have 100 years to solve the plastic waste crisis, we have to act now and I believe that with the innovations that we've made along with innovations made from other research groups, we can do it. I want to be involved in it and I want to see it happen.