Q&A With Nicholas Rorrer: Plant-Based Plastics and Plastic Plants
By age nine, Nicholas Rorrer was busy staining T-shirts with ketchup.
Rorrer was not a messy kid. Quite the opposite; his ketchup stains were part of a surprisingly well-controlled experiment on how various soaps work on stains of all colors.
Today, Rorrer, who is a senior researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), studies how to clean up a very different, far more complicated mess—plastics, or rather the molecular building blocks (called polymers) behind these bitter-sweet materials.
