Question: What made you want to discover how to make plastic from fruit peel ?

Laura Schofield answered on 17 Nov 2014:

Hi! Since I started at Uni I’d been really interested in working for Martyn Poliakoff (google him or look at the bottom photo on my profile – he’s brilliant!) and do something to do with Green Chemistry – that means making Chemistry better for the environment and focus on using renewable sources for our chemicals, like using plants and waste fruit peel!
I didn’t really sit down one day and think about what it is I particularly I wanted to do. In fact, during my Masters project (in the last year of my 4 year degree, I got to work in a lab with PhD students making small clusters of molecules called nanoparticles in hot water) Martyn approached me and asked if I would like to do a PhD with him. He told me that there was a company that wanted to continue their research into making plastic from fruit peel and would I be interested in being the one to do it? I jumped at the chance and the rest, as they say, is history!