Imagine that products have a longer shelf life because of smart packaging, that plastic robots are driven by their environment, and that clothing adapts while being worn. In short: that you can make plastic smart so that the material reacts to its environment, for example by adjusting humidity, temperature or light. For his Ph.D. research Rob Verpaalen looked at how you can produce bulk plastics without radically altering the current industrial processing processes. He obtained his Ph.D. on 22 September at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry.