I don’t know who put this airheaded bint on the materials science beat, but I really wish they hadn’t. Her awful and barely literate writing as if there was only one type of plastic until this stuff came along, and repeated high-school activist panic that all plastic is bad for the environment makes the story more about her ignorance than the technological development that she’s barely able to report on, even while parroting the dumbed down explanations the actual engineers and scientists provided to her.
The problem is that it is pretty inert and does nothing to the environment whatsoever except pile up in unsightly dumps. It's not the fault of chemistry that humans are slobs.