Ever wonder how your jumble of used drink bottles and food containers gets turned into streams of raw materials for new clothes, benches and car parts? Recycling plastics involves some clever molecular detective work. To separate the milk jugs from the yogurt containers from the toothpaste tubes, recycling facilities use infrared light to tease out the "spectral fingerprints" of different kinds of plastics. These fingerprints reveal which molecules each object is made of. Using this information,