## 1 Introduction  
The worldwide production of plastics exceeds 500 million metric tons (Mt) per year and is expected to reach 700 Mt by 2030 [1, 2]. Less than 30% of waste plastics gets recycled each year, both because of the high costs associated with the collection/processing of the waste and the difficulties in the recycling of some of the polymers. Mechanical recycling of polymers tends to deteriorate the performance of the materials. Chemical recycling has the advantage of producing new polymers from the monomers or oligomers obtained upon depolymerization of the original polymers but is highly challenging except for very limited cases [1]. In principle, step-growth polymers, such as polyesters, polyamides, and polyurethane, are easier to depolymerize than chain-growth polymers connected by C-C bonds because their acyl-derived backbones can be hydrolyzed by chemical reagents/catalysts or enzyme catalysts. Chemical depolymerization has the advantage of a wide choice of reagents/catalysts and a broad operating window. Nonetheless, the harsh reaction conditions utilized could lead to undesirable side reactions and add significant costs and/or environmental burdens to the process. In contrast, enzymatic degradation could happen under mild conditions in aqueous solutions with minimal side reactions. Aliphatic PC is hydrolyzed by lipase relatively easily [3]. Good enzymatic catalysts to break down aromatic polycarbonate (PC), however, are practically nonexistent [4]. Aromatic PC, especially those derived from bisphenol A (BPA), contains benzene rings and quaternary carbon atoms in the main chain. Its enzymatic [5], fungal [6], or microbial [7] degradation is sluggish due to the much higher hydrophobicity and rigidity of the polymer backbone. A method that can potentially bridge the chemical and enzymatic depolymerization of hydrolyzable plastics is to design and synthesize artificial enzymes or nanozymes with hydrolytic activities [8; 9]. Ideally, one would like to have catalysts with the efficiency and selectivity of enzymes but a much stronger tolerance for reaction media and temperatures. In recent years, a number of chemical recycling methods of BPA-PC have been reported and reviewed [10; 11]. Organic bases such as N,N\({}^{\prime}\)-dimethyl-1,2-diaminoethane [12], 1,5,7-Triazabicyclo[4.4.0]-dec-5-ene [13; 14], or 1,8-diazabicyclo[5.4.0]undec-7-ene (DBU) [15] at high temperatures are often used for the depolymerization. Researchers have also attempted to make de novo-designed enzymes for BPA-PC hydrolysis [16]. Efficient artificial enzymes for the same purpose, however, have not been reported to the best of our knowledge. In the past decades, gold nanoparticles have emerged as a versatile platform for designing hydrolytic nanozymes, with the facile assembly of different ligands on their surfaces to create catalytic sites [17; 18; 19]. It is, however, difficult to create well-defined active sites as in enzymes for specific substrates because a complimentary covalent framework needs to be formed around the substrate, with appropriately distributed binding and catalytic groups. Our group has been interested in the construction of nanozymes through molecular imprinting of cross-linkable micelles [20; 21; 22]. As with other molecular imprinting techniques [23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 31; 32], the method relies on the polymerization and cross-linking of functional monomers (FMs) around template molecules to create template-complimentary binding sites within a polymer network. Installation of catalytic groups in the molecularly imprinted binding sites converts the imprinted polymers into artificial enzymes, with some capable hydrolyzing activated esters [23; 33; 34; 35; 36]. However, the traditional molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are macroporous polymers, which are microscopic and insoluble. It is challenging to employ an insoluble catalyst to hydrolyze an insoluble (polymer) substrate, due to inaccessibility of the BPA-PC polymer chain to the catalyst.