Traditional plastic recycling by mechanical methods is a mature pathway but faces significant inadequacies as a waste management strategy because it can only accept limited types of plastics (mainly bottles of polyethylene terephthalate-PET and high-density polyethylene-HDPE), which represent less than 12% of post-consumer plastic waste . Furthermore, mechanical recycling can yield lower quality products than its starting materials (downcycling) . In addition, mechanical recycling methods cannot easily process flexible plastics, including multilayered films (e.g., used for food packaging), which represent roughly 35% of plastics currently produced . Ultimately, the lack of scalable recycling infrastructure promotes the need of waste disposal methods such as landfilling and incineration, which give rise to a host of environmental and social issues (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions and land use).