From inexpensive mass products to tailored high-tech materials, our modern world without plastics is unimaginable. The major downside to this is the use of fossil fuels and the growing quantities of waste. A new approach could be the production of high-grade plastics made from biomass that could be made to fall apart into recyclable components. The “destruct command” would be given with light of a specific wavelength, as demonstrated by researchers in the journal Angewandte Chemie.