Birmingham Plastics Network

[Music] Hello I'm Andrew Dove, a professor of Sustainable Polymer Chemistry at the University of Birmingham I'm also a co-lead of the Birmingham Plastics Network. The Birmingham Plastics network is a collection of around 50 researchers from across the breadth of the University of Birmingham's research expertise we've recently received a grant from EPSOC and BBSRC that is focused on circularising medical testing waste plastic there is a lot of waste plastic generated every day and millions of tons of plastics are generated through those waste testing plastics. They're used once and they're thrown away or they're incinerated we'd like to find ways to be able to circularise that waste part of our approach to addressing plastic waste is to work in an interdisciplinary manner.

One of the really interesting things I've seen happen in the last five years is the increase in collaboration when we first started five years ago most people didn't understand, well they understood a little bit of their own part in the supply chain, but they didn't understand the whole picture and that's the change.

Hi, I'm Professor Fern Elston Baker and I'm the director of The Institute of STEMM in Culture and Society at Birmingham University and I'm co-leading on the Birmingham Plastic Networks Policy Commission. The Birmingham Plastics Network brings together different voices to try and find a sort of whole system's way of thinking about how we address the future of sustainable plastics and it's only through bringing these different voices together that we can really think about those broader social, economic, environmental and political implications of Plastics in society in the UK. That's why we've convened a policy commission to actually start to think about how can we pull together all of this different thinking from across these different areas to really respond to the challenge that faces this in the coming decades.

I'm Baroness Molly Meacher across-bench peer I'm not a scientist but rather I'm an economist, but I am absolutely passionate about the vital importance of finding a sustainable future for plastics for the planet. We do need a national conversation on the future of plastics and that is why I'm delighted to lead a policy commission with the University of Birmingham to find a pathway to a sustainable future for Plastics and to develop recommendations for government to ensure this pathway is followed.

Actually, the UK government is in a great position to place impactful and ambitious targets with respect to plastic circularity and I'm fully confident that the policy commission work that the University of Birmingham is doing is going to really lead to some positive outcomes in that space.