Not to be too graphic, but:
You have a mouthful of saliva and various gentle and harmlesss blobs of phlegm in your mouth. If you are like me, you can push (stream) it through your teeth (like a nozzle). The phlegm blobs deform and pass deftly through the gap between your teeth and there is an untorn
phlem blob on the other side of your mouth. The wet stringy stuff made it through intact.
Now lets say you are pushing injection molding plastic through a nozzle to make something cheap and disposable. For some slipperiness (viscosity) of polymer, some diameter of stringiness, and some outrageous cheapness of stringy polymer you can make injection molded things, with only slight modifications and improvements to existing technology that has ...Support Fibers (string goop) all throughout it.
Let's say it works. The injection molded object, often a disposable object, is 5-10% structurally stronger because the slight stringiness made it through the nozzle. The great thing is, the ecology message got to you, so instead of making a pizza table 10% stronger, you decide to make it the same strength with 10% less material. You are reducing the amount of disposable plastic in the environment, and materials costs simultaneously.
How does the stringiness occur in the first place? injection molded plastic, and other methods of plastics manufacture, starts out as pellets. These pellets could be made with stringiness part of their nature. The cheapest way is to dip/roll coat them in stripes of the same polymer, but a longer more-mer longer higher AMU version (stringiness), or perhaps powder compress them from layers, with some of the layers being higher AMU versions of the injection molding polymer.
Another way to do it, which I really like, but it might not work, is laser polymer surgery en masse at already produced pellets traversing a pathway or hopper during their manufacture. I'm not really sure, but if you put a little warm laser line on a piece of plastic, it might kind of congeal and retain some limited memory of the hot 3D spaghetti path you make in it with IR light (diffraction grating/hologram).
Zero additives involved. I just have this perception that if you melt, and casually, without extra equipment, let cool, plastic it retains some shape information. So, you make beautiful 3D shapes of IR laser light that look like referee stripes, or whatever the genetic algorithm likes best to turn into optimized strings, and project them into industrial standard, unmodifed plastic pellets of unusually standard and otherwise unmodified variety (cheap). This could be done at the pellet factory. Some people might even want to laser up their pellets at the melt/injection machine at the plastic object factory.
You injection mold the plastic. Its got stringiness, however much you like. The genetic algorithm models suggest different amounts of stringiness for different but very high volume, globally similar applications of pellet plastic. Wire insulation. (there's a lot of that), flimsy food bags and frozen pizza membrane wrappers, and grocery store bags and car vehicle interiors, and, a big one, geotextiles, like the cover-all-ground plastic (visqueen) they use to grow strawberries and other agricultural crops.
They could just purposefully do a genetic algorithm optimization of string length, how many strings, string form (form: because, remembering mucous through your teeth, you can pass a Y shape, or a loose mesh #, or an octopus through a nozzle) at say the 300 most frequent uses of pellet plastic on earth to see if they can go beyond my 10% less plastic estimate to use 14% less plastic.
So there you go, less plastic around, money saved, and genetic algorithms.
N.B. a really advanced polymer chef might figure out if styrofoam insulation and packaging can be made 10-14% more volumetric, at standard strength than 2020 AD styrofoam. Along with calling on Genetic algorithms the actual human design ideas that might do this are:
It could just work, that is you make some stringy polymer referee striped styrene prepuff beads, and hey, they just work better when inflated.
Expanding a styrene microbead that has been lasered to have, without even remotely actually being a hoberman sphere or a gimbal, lots of concentric linked circles near it's bead perimeter/surface may increase postpuff strength. Solvent puff expansion brings these lasered-in meridian shapes' putative strength into play, and strength is increased at a puffier-puffing ratio of solvent to plastic. I've seen similar looking jellyfish.
The other thing they could do with styrofoam is something kind of bold, they could use sound (acoustics) when they forge the styropellets so the styropellets are like hollow gumballs. It could be cheap, it's just sound transducers aimed at tubes when they make the prepuff beads, but the effect of hollow core styrofoam crumbles is to use 10-20% less while the perimeter does all the being strong for the engineering application.
Perhaps hollow core and strength meridian combined could utilize 20% material, individually they are 10%, and computer modelling and genetic algorithms could bring them up to using 26% less actual mass of polymer to make the same strength of styrofoam (such as packing materials)