Recycling these plastics is simple, says polymer chemist Jeannette García of IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. Recycling methods for standard plastics like water bottles often involve melting the polymers at very high temperatures, which tends to damage the chemical building blocks and change the polymers’ properties. But by fortuitously adding a double amine — one that has two nitrogens — to the formaldehyde, García’s team created triazines that could link together into a three-dimensional network, forming a polymer with superpowers.