Only way I’m doing it is if I assembled the machine from a kit and got to inspect the source code myself.

Immediate red flag to me, when one of the sponsors of the research is someone who directly benefits from its findings.

Literally the most common reason anything ever has received funding, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. They don’t really benefit unless it actually works in this case, unlike a sugary drink manufacturer looking to show that sugar is healthy on paper. This is too technical to be helpful to them optically rather it’s helpful in that it actually reduces the impact of their products on the environment in a provable way if implemented allowing them to avoid tighter regulation or outright bans of them. (for better or worse)

That or their motives are less self serving, which is rare in the corporate world but does happen. Sometimes enough people at a company care to make things better.

Also I’m sure they’d love to be able to take those plastics and turn them back into feedstock hydrocarbons to get nice virgin plastic on the cheap as oil prices inevitably rise in the coming decades.

The methane just breaks down into an equivalent amount of CO2 when vented anyways and until then is a much more potent greenhouse gas. That’s why it’s usually flared off apart from safety.