On 6 October, TRANSFORM-CE hosted a webinar for businesses, government authorities and the general public interested in plastic recycling and the circular economy.
This was the third of a series of informational webinars, for Interreg NW Europe funded project, TRANSFORM-CE. In this webinar the project partners shared their knowledge, experiences and insights on design and product development with recycled plastic.
Attendees got a better understanding of TRANSFORM-CE and how the project is facilitating the recycling of single use plastics, as well as how these materials and processes could be applied within their own business.
The webinar was opened by Dr David Greenfield, Managing Director at SOcial, ENvironmental & EConomic Solutions (SOENECS), who welcomed guests from all over Europe. David gave a progress report on TRANSFORM-CE activities and explained the structure, goals and benefits of the project.
The TRANSFORM-CE animation video was shown. The video illustrates the project activities.
After this introduction, the sceptre was handed over to Ruth Mugge, Full Professor in Design for Sustainable Consumer Behaviour of Technische Universiteit Delft. She presented the research that her research group at TUDelft performed as part of the TRANSFORM-CE project to understand and improve consumer adoption of recycled plastics. She explained first the results of a literature review on how consumers currently evaluate products made from recycled plastics and what benefits and risks they perceive in these products. Further, she presented the seven guidelines that they developed in order to use design and marketing strategies to tackle the barriers and make the benefits more salient in order to enhance consumer adoption of products made from recycled plastics.
Bram Peters and Stefan Schoegje of the Green Plastic Factory, then took the guests through the history, present and future to figure out how to make the ultimate plastic product.
Where to start with your idea of making a product from plastic waste? And how do you add the most value to a product which has been made out of plastic waste? They based their presentation on their own experiences from the Green Plastic Factory.
Rhiannon Hunt, Circular Economy Project Manager at of Manchester Metropolitan University, talked about fused filament fabrication (FFF) 3D printing, using recycled single use plastic waste, and the products created to date through TRANSFORM-CE.
The webinar’s Q&A, moderated by David Greenfield followed was the end of the webinar. We were pleased that the Q&A included exciting comments and questions from the audience.
Dr Rhiannon Hunt took the opportunity to invite the attendees to get in touch at circulareconomy@mmu.ac.uk should they have any questions about the project or business support, or if they wished to receive free sample spools of recycled filament.
PowerPoints:
Link to research and guidelines TU Delft: https://www.nweurope.eu/projects/project-search/transform-ce-transforming-single-use-plastic-waste-into-additive-manufacturing-and-intrusion-extrusion-moulding-feedstocks-and-creating-a-new-circular-economy-model-for-nwe/#tab-9