For decades, research in the polymer industry focused on improving the physical properties of plastics, and plastic eventually replaced traditional materials like metal, paper, and glass in many uses. The effort was so successful, and plastics are now so ubiquitous, that the industry finds itself with a waste crisis on its hands. So polymer companies are turning their R&D attention toward sustainability. Still in the early stages of her professional career as a research scientist at Dow, Evelyn Auyeung has already made great advances in furthering polymer sustainability. Auyeung works with polyolefin catalysts, including heterogeneous catalysts such as Ziegler-Natta-type catalysts, as well as homogeneous catalysts. She aims to use them to help with multiple sustainability dilemmas. One is the problem of multilayer materials . Flexible food packaging might look as if it is made of a single kind of plastic, but it actually consists of multiple layers of different plastics,