Even more:

Daniel Burd (Canada) - Bacteria that break down polyethylene - https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2008/07/01/waterloo_student...

Miranda Wang & Jeanny Yao (Canada) - Bacteria that eat phthalates - https://www.sciencealert.com/students-are-developing-a-bacte...

Tseng I-Ching (Taiwan) - Bacteria that degrade Styrofoam - https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/hi...

Morgan Vague (Oregon, US) - polyethylene terephthalate [See OP]

And there exists even more research on this, out of Japan.

Can we please just take all those bacteria and together throw them into a bioreactor along with some well mixed, diverse plastic trash, for that sweet, sweet horizontal gene transfer?

Bonus if we can also get some fungi and/or lichen and/or bryophytes in there/out of that.

Another evergreens:

- battery breakthrough

- solar cells efficiency breakthrough

- water electrolysis breakthrough

Don't forget the occasional breakthroughs that give us hope in nuclear fusion power :)

- new antibacterial breakthrough

- superconductor breakthrough

- graphene manufacturing breakthrough

- quantum computing breakthrough

- cancer treatment breakthrough