Plastic waste has long outpaced our ability to process it cleanly, but chemistry keeps searching for better answers. Researchers at Southeast University have found that the temperature at which a zeolite catalyst is assembled — not merely what it is made of — determines how long it can convert discarded plastic into gasoline and aromatics before carbon deposits silence it. By crystallizing the catalyst at a cooler 120 degrees Celsius, the team produced an open, porous architecture that resists the very fouling that has kept thermochemical recycling from scaling. A single adjustable parameter,