One of the most outstanding astrochemistry problems, since the advent of the IRAS satellite, is the identification of the chemical carriers (structure and composition) of the cosmically widespread unidentified infrared (UIR) emission features. The mid-infrared spectra of a particular group of evolved stars like fullerene-rich planetary nebulAE(PNe) are dominated by aliphatic hydrocarbon-rich dust, showing several broad UIR emission features such as the 6-9 (7 μm hereafter) and the 9-13-micron (12 μm hereafter) plateau emission features, among others. In particular, the 7 and 12 μm plateau emission features have been suggested to emerge from hydrogenated amorphous carbon (HAC) dust grains or similar mixed aliphatic-aromatic hydrocarbon nanoparticles (HAC-like). The laboratory optical constants of specific HAC-like dust grains (i.e., in terms of structure/composition) have been recently used in conjunction with a photoionization code, showing for the first time that HAC-like dust grains convincingly reproduce the 12 μm plateau emission feature observed in the prototypical fullerene PN Tc 1 (and yet consistent with the dust continuum emission and the 7 μm plateau feature observed). Interestingly, the same HAC-like grains may reproduce the far-UV rise circumstellar extinction observed towards PN Tc 1. The possible detection of HAC-like dust grains in the circumstellar envelope of a fullerene PN is of special interest to the fullerene formation mechanism, suggesting that fullerenes around in PNe could be formed by the processing and/or destruction of HAC-like dust. Our very recent work thus strongly encourage more laboratory experiments to obtain the optical constants (n and k indices) of HAC-like dust grains with several structures/compositions in order to extend this kind of modelling studies to more fullerene PNe and/or even other astrophysical objects.