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) who will illustrate some of the materials they have developed, tested and their application into product design. Zoe and Alysia will also be interested to identify potential future materials needs or opportunities from the audience and ways to co-create future regional initiatives.

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.