Scientists have invented a way to make compostable plastics break down within a few weeks with just heat and water. The new process, developed by researchers at University of California, Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, involves embedding polyester-eating enzymes in the plastic as it's made. "If you have the enzyme only on the surface of the plastic, it would just etch down very slowly," said Ting Xu, UC Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering and of chemistry. "You want it distributed nanoscopically everywhere so that, essentially, each of them just needs to eat away their polymer neighbors, and then the whole material disintegrates." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic also appeared in Spektrum.de, and IFLScience.