Consistent with earlier findings, we found that applied damage can indeed induce the amplification cascade leading to complete degradation of the gels after 168 hours. In contrast, gels without 1 remained stable during the entire observation time. To further confirm the effect of mechanical damage and to provide a correlation between material damage and its degradability, we carried out experiments for which we applied two cuts on the gels (1x horizontally and 1x vertically). Since more cuts generate more radicals, we hypothesised faster degradation due to higher activation of 1. Indeed, from the comparison in Figure , it can be seen that gels which were cut two times degraded faster than gels with only one cut.