“It was Christmas. I was watching the fireplace,” Greg Liu said.
When fire wood burns, it gives off smoke, which is made up of smaller particles of the firewood. Liu wondered whether burning plastic would work the same way.
“Firewood is mostly made of polymers such as cellulose. The combustion of firewood breaks these polymers into short chains, and then into small gaseous molecules before full oxidation to carbon dioxide,” he said. “If we similarly break down the synthetic polyethylene molecules but stop the process before they break all the way down to small gaseous molecules, then we should obtain short-chain, polyethylene-like molecules.”

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That Started Liu on the journey that will change the world and turn waste into "gold".