ExeMPLaR Webinar 2: Nature inspired approaches to future plastics
Date: October 31
Time: 3pm-4pm
Speakers: Alysia Garmulewicz & Zoe Powell (Materiom) & Professor Peter Hopkinson
We are pleased to invite you to view our second webinar:
For billions of years, terrestrial and marine habitats have thrived
in producing vast quantities of materials, all without landfill or
waste. It’s time we took advice from nature. Materiom, a partner on the
ExeMPLaR project, provide open data on how to make
materials that nourish local economies and ecologies. They support
companies, cities, and communities in creating and selecting materials
sourced from locally abundant biomass that are part of a regenerative
circular economy. Materiom have created a library
of open source recipes for materials that use green chemistry methods
and nutrients such as sugars, proteins, fats and common minerals, making
them biodegradable by design – a key principle of a circular
bio-economy.

The webinar will provide an introduction to the potential for creating alternatives and substitutes for synthetic plastics that can be developed by local companies, innovators and entrepreneurs.
The webinar will feature founder of Materiom, Alysia Garmulewicz, (https://materiom.org/user/3) and materials researcher and tutor Zoe Powell (https://materiom.org/user/389
Webinar: Creating a new circular plastics economy for the South West
Date: October 8th
Time: 1200-1300
Speaker: Professor Peter Hopkinson

We are pleased to invite you to the first live session in our ExEMPLaR webinar programme. Each month we will host a live session related to a key theme in our Regional Plastics project. These sessions will take place at lunchtime and involve one or more speakers in a short presentation followed by a discussion and Q&A to help support our Network for Change.
The first topic is an overview of the project and some initial insights, activities and findings from across the project including:
- understanding the stocks and flows of plastics in the SW region,
- the fate and treatment of plastics at their end of use phase,
- the potential health and eco-toxicological effects of plastics and how we are assessing this,
- regional and local initiatives and how these are making a change
- the role of local and regional biomaterials to replace fossil fuel plastics in product design
- local innovation and entrepreneurial activities making a difference including closing loops, citizen science and plastic free schemes
- the challenges in shifting our current use of plastics
- future enablers and effective places to intervene in the system to make a difference at scale
Each of these topics will be covered in greater detail in future webinar and KE events.
We hope you can join us and look forward to your participation. Note that all our live sessions are recorded and you will have access to these as a member.