As the global production of plastics surges, waste plastic management has become a significant social and environmental issue. Maintaining landfills for disposing of non-biodegradable plastics takes valuable agricultural lands, and transporting wastes to remote landfills creates a substantial economic burden and carbon emissions. Combusting plastics for heat is less effective and can create secondary pollution. Moreover, waste plastics leaked into water bodies became environmental threats to living things. Mechanical and chemical recycling are considered two major approaches for reusing plastics and reducing landfilled waste. For example, post-industrial waste plastics with a single composition can be effectively recycled through re-extrusion and molding. However, low-quality post-consumer and mixed plastics are unsuitable for mechanical recycling. In this context, chemical upcycling can convert different grades of waste plastics into transportation fuels and platform chemicals. This talk will describe the current strategies for managing post-consumer plastics and present our research progress in chemically upcycling waste plastics. Adding waste plastics as a hydrogen donor source can synergistically enhance the thermochemical conversion of biomass to biofuels. Besides co-converting with biomass, properly sorted and decontaminated plastics can be converted on their own to produce desired aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbons selectively. The high-energy demands for thermally deconstructing plastics can be improved by developing a novel non-thermal plasma conversion. Based on this unconventional conversion technology, it is possible to transform waste plastics into commodity oleochemicals using renewable electricity as a power source and greenhouse gas CO₂ as a reactant. This talk will also discuss the heterogeneity among the post-consumer waste plastics collected from different material-recovery facilities and the challenges of converting waste plastics with impurity contents.