Departmental Seminar: Plastics, smells and heritage

We are all aware of the problems posed by plastic materials in the environment. But we rarely think about the history of these materials and how they have changed people’s lifestyles over the last 150 years. The impact that plastic objects have had on society, technology, art and design means that they are collected in their millions by museums, libraries and archives. Plastics form important parts of heritage collections such as photographic archives, 20th century costume or modern sculpture collections. Unfortunately, plastics are some of the least stable materials found in museum collections and some objects have suffered from catastrophic and irreversible decay not long after acquisition.

Research undertaken by Dr Katherine Curran at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage focuses on understanding the nature of the degradation processes in plastic objects in museum collections. Using accelerated degradation experiments, her research group studies the chemical and physical processes involved and how these are influenced by the museum environment. This work aims to develop mathematical models to explain plastic degradation, an approach with potential for understanding plastic degradation in other environments, such as the marine environment, or in landfill. Katherine’s work also explores the use of non-invasive analytical methods for studying the composition and degradation of real plastic artefacts in collections, in collaboration with museums such as Tate and the Museum of London.