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Improving designs to reduce plastic waste
A multi-disciplinary UCL team is seeking to ‘design out’ plastic waste by devising innovative new ways to reuse, recycle or compost plastic.
7 October 2020
Designing-out Plastic Waste has brought together a diverse team of UCL researchers interested in solving the plastic waste problem.
The initial group, led by the Professor Mark Miodownik (UCL Institute of Making), includes a wide range of UCL experts, from biochemical engineers and chemists to psychologists, economists and sustainability researchers.
“We believe that waste is a failure of design,” says Professor Miodownik. “Each design failure affects and compromises the whole system, leading to leakage of plastic into the environment, and creating an economic burden on the UK.”
The project is identifying changes in design that will make it easier to recycle plastics that can be recycled, as well as developing novel technologies to recycle plastics that currently cannot.
“For example, plastic laminate films have been identified by the retail and manufacturing sector as fundamental to their business, but are currently problematic to recycle,” explains Professor Miodownik. “We’re hoping to develop a new bacteria-based recycling technology that will consume plastics, breaking them down into reusable material.”
The project is also engaging with the public as, Professor Miodownik argues, “we need to break down the barriers that prevent more people from reducing their use of plastic to recycling. To do this we need to take the public with us – they buy plastic in the form of packaging and they are the ones who must put in the right bin.”
