The paper's abstract is intriguing, and kind of buries the lead. The waste plastic angle is a bit of a headline-grabbing red herring. The authors claim they c

The paper's abstract is intriguing, and kind of buries the lead. The waste plastic angle is a bit of a headline-grabbing red herring. The authors claim they can turn straight-chain hydrocarbons into aromatic ring molecules, which I believe traditionally has been very hard. There's nothing special about waste plastic as a source of straight-chain hydrocarbons, they could be obtained from a variety of biomass sources. Traditionally the only economical source of aromatic molecules has been distillation of petroleum. An economical way to turn biomass-derived simple hydrocarbons into aromatics could be revolutionary, as a path for making fuel as well as a range of other high-value compounds, like phenolic plastic resin.