{"id":445869,"date":"2025-12-14T05:48:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T05:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/445869\/"},"modified":"2025-12-14T05:48:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T05:48:14","slug":"she-wanted-to-write-fantasy-now-she-is-rewriting-recycling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/445869\/","title":{"rendered":"She Wanted To Write Fantasy. Now, She Is Rewriting Recycling."},"content":{"rendered":"

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription<\/a> or on Stripe<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meet Taylor Uekert, the Gymnast-Turned-Nanoengineer Who Harnesses Molecular Machines To Remake Plastics, Chemicals, and More<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Caitlin McDermott-Murphy, NLR<\/a><\/p>\n

Three days after 9-year-old\u00a0Taylor Uekert<\/a>\u00a0moved to the foothills outside San Diego, her parents woke her and her brother in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n

\u201cGet up and get to the car,\u201d they said. \u201cThere\u2019s a fire!\u201d<\/p>\n

Flames shadowboxed above the mountain just behind their house. No alert or evacuation notice had been issued. The fire was too new.<\/p>\n

Uekert grabbed for things. Her love-flattened teddy bear, Ben, and a few books. As she hustled out the door and to the car, she looked back. Ashes and embers feinted in the night, drifting toward her house. She got in the car.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then we were just trying to get out,\u201d Uekert said. \u201cIt was a kind of out-of-body experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

They made it out.<\/p>\n

Miraculously, their house survived too. But that experience changed how Uekert perceived her previously predictable world.<\/p>\n

Today, Uekert is a senior researcher at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), formerly known as NREL. Before she joined the laboratory, she studied nanoengineering, which taught her how to manipulate the molecular skeletons that form trees, milk jugs, medicines, and everything else.<\/p>\n

\u201cNanoengineering ticked the box of how the world works and how I could start to help fix it,\u201d Uekert said.<\/p>\n

At NLR, she is helping to fix the world by improving imperfect processes, like plastic recycling and chemicals production. She also helps researchers bypass pitfalls that could prevent their early-stage technologies from getting out of the lab and into industries, homes, or the power grid.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want my work to be useful to as many people as possible,\u201d Uekert said.<\/p>\n

In the latest Manufacturing Masterminds Q&A, Uekert shares what she\u00a0really\u00a0wanted to be when she grew up, why some people think recycling is broken (but she does not), and why she could not say no when NLR offered her a position. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Taylor Uekert considered pursuing a career in creative writing. She chose science but still writes and recently penned a fantasy book about five sisters. Each possesses a different power and a different aspect of Uekert\u2019s personality. (She identifies most with the oldest, who has the power of organization.) Photo from Taylor Uekert, National Laboratory of the Rockies.<\/p>\n

How did you get from the San Diego foothills to NLR? What\u2019s your origin story?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I like that, \u201corigin story.\u201d That makes me sound like I\u2019m either a villain or a hero. The world can be super powerful, especially when it goes wrong. I wanted to come up with solutions, so I ended up going into bioengineering because I was like, \u201cOh, biology. That\u2019s how the world works. That\u2019s how I\u2019ll start to fix things.\u201d<\/p>\n

How did that go?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I did not like it. I worked in a lab during undergrad, and it was a lot of cell work, a lot of mouse work. And it was just not for me. Then I sat in on this nanoengineering course that was all about how the world is built up from atoms and we can manipulate how those atoms interact. If you know why things exist and how they are made, you can change their properties and how they behave.<\/p>\n

That makes me think of you, age 9, wanting to manipulate the fire, to change it on a molecular basis.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wish I had been smart enough to do that.<\/p>\n

That would be your origin story if you end up a superhero.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exactly.<\/p>\n

So, you pursued master\u2019s and doctoral degrees in nanoengineering at Cambridge University, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. I studied how we can convert plastic waste into fuel using sunlight. That was super fun, and I started thinking a lot about how we measure a technology to decide if it is actually environmentally friendly. We rarely have numbers to back that up. I wanted to learn about techniques, like life-cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis, which we can use to measure the effect a technology has on the environment and the economy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>When gymnastics started to interfere with school, Uekert\u2019s mom homeschooled her young gymnast from age 10 to 14. Uekert (pictured here) stopped during her senior year of high school when it failed to bring her the same joy it used to, but she still benefits from the skills she learned from the sport, like time management and organization. Photo from Taylor Uekert, National Laboratory of the Rockies<\/p>\n

It sounds like you always knew you were destined for something in the sciences. Is that right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I would say no. I get bored easily. I\u2019ve always dabbled in a bunch of different stuff. Growing up, I wanted to be a creative writer. I still do some writing in my spare time, mostly fantasy. I also did gymnastics for 11 years. I competed at the national level, but I was never going to go to the Olympics. Science probably took over partially because my mom told me, \u201cIf you want to be a great writer, you need to experience the world first. And a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) career is one way to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s very practical.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Both my mother and I are very practical people, yes.<\/p>\n

OK, back to your career. How did you end up at NLR?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My husband is from Italy. We were planning to stay in Europe after I finished my Ph.D. This was [during] COVID times, so the job market was weird. NLR was the only U.S. position I applied for. And I remember when I got it, I was like, \u201cI cannot turn NLR down.\u201d It\u2019s such a well-regarded place to work. I had the best conversations with the people who interviewed me. After a couple years\u2019 long distance, I convinced my husband to come over too. Now, life is good.<\/p>\n

You came to NLR to focus on those analysis techniques you mentioned earlier, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I took a big leap of faith. NLR took a leap of faith on me as well. I had basically no background in analysis. But I was eager to learn, plus my Ph.D. project combined what I\u2019d say are two of the biggest challenges we face: energy and materials. Those two pieces form our overall impact on the environment. So, working in both of those spaces, that really hit the sweet spot for me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Uekert still dabbles in a variety of activities. She loves hiking, skiing, and biking (especially gravel biking), is part of a community choir, and bakes. (Pies are her favorite treats to bake.) \u201cAh, pie,\u201d Uekert said. \u201cIt\u2019s got an old-lady thing, and I am an old lady at heart.\u201d Photo from Taylor Uekert, National Laboratory of the Rockies<\/p>\n

Analysis is kind of an NLR sweet spot too.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, absolutely. And I\u2019ve been here ever since.<\/p>\n

Tell me about your current work. What are you doing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are two main pieces. The first is using analysis to pinpoint the economic and environmental performance of new technologies, specifically for plastic recycling and making chemicals from waste. The second is making analysis tools that help identify problems at the earliest stages of research. Say I\u2019m working on a new photocatalyst in the lab. I want to see that go out into the world and make a difference. Can I figure out the pain points in terms of cost or pollution or water use and start to fix those now before I scale it up and it becomes much harder to fix?<\/p>\n

Have you ever been surprised by this analysis?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, we did some\u00a0analysis of mechanical recycling<\/a>, which is what we use to recycle plastics today. There\u2019s a lot of hype around plastic recycling being broken. But really, mechanical recycling is relatively cheap and low energy. What\u2019s broken is\u00a0collecting\u00a0plastic. If you put your plastic into the blue bin, most likely it\u2019s going to be recycled. But if it doesn\u2019t get in the bin, there\u2019s no way to bring it back into our economy. That surprised me because, as researchers, we want a technological solution. But there isn\u2019t one. It\u2019s a matter of accessibility.<\/p>\n

How does your work overlap with manufacturing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many products we manufacture are tied to plastics. It\u2019s in our clothing, water bottles, laptops. It\u2019s the same when it comes to chemicals. We use chemicals in cleaning agents, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, beauty products. And if we can produce those plastics or chemicals from waste streams, for example, you can change the supply chain but keep it within known manufacturing processes that we use today.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Uekert used to be shy and hate public speaking, but she is also stubborn. Today, she is a champion for science communication and even cohosts a podcast, called Greenscore, which gives an environmental score to specific products, like toilet paper, Christmas trees, and coffee. \u201cWe need to get out of our bubble and share our work with people around us for it to make a difference,\u201d she said. Photo by Joe DelNero, National Laboratory of the Rockies.<\/p>\n

What future work are you most excited about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019re starting to look at hard-to-recycle plastics, like textiles, carbon fiber, and PVC (or polyvinyl chloride) to figure out how to make that recycling economically and environmentally viable. In chemicals, we\u2019ve benchmarked hundreds of ways to go from waste to chemicals to show which you could focus on if you care about supply chain resiliency and reducing pollution. The next step will be to develop a list of critical chemicals, like the one we have for critical materials, to make sure we\u2019re focusing on the ones that are most crucial.<\/p>\n

And then I\u2019m doing some work on making analysis more accessible to earlier-stage researchers. We\u2019re seeing if there are other places we could apply it, like startups coming out of\u00a0West Gate<\/a>\u00a0or U.S. Department of Energy funding.<\/p>\n

Essentially to make sure this kind of analysis is baked into the process early on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, exactly.<\/p>\n

What advice do you have for folks who might want to follow in your footsteps?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Follow what is interesting to you. I worried for such a long time that I didn\u2019t have a five-year plan or vision. I\u2019ve realized, the parts of my career that I\u2019m most proud of, I just followed what was interesting to me at that moment. It\u2019s OK if an interest is not related to some great vision.<\/p>\n

Anything else you\u2019d like to mention?<\/strong><\/p>\n

While I love the work that I do, what keeps me really excited about being here at NLR is I get to work with so many great people and teams. That\u2019s how we push things forward. It\u2019s not by working independently. It\u2019s by working together.<\/p>\n

Like molecules.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exactly.<\/p>\n

Read other\u00a0Q&As from NLR researchers in advanced manufacturing<\/a>, and\u00a0browse open positions<\/a>\u00a0to see what it is like to work at NLR.<\/p>\n

And check out our\u00a0Work With Us<\/a> page to learn how you can collaborate with our experts.<\/p>\n

Sign up for CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott’s in-depth analyses and high level summaries<\/a>, sign up for our daily newsletter<\/a>, and follow us on Google News<\/a>!<\/p>\n

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