Rethinking Plastics Pollution Post-Pandemic

The project investigates challenges in plastics pollution and waste-management, in the light of the impacts of Covid-19 on environmental/waste governance.

This project brings together an interdisciplinary team from the Universities of Surrey (UK), Wollongong (Australia), and São Paulo (Brazil) to form the UGPN Rethinking Plastics Network.

Our understanding of how waste plastics impact the environment, health and marine life has dramatically shifted over recent years, with growing appreciation of the scale of damage inflicted on our planet. Efforts to translate this into law and policy to optimise waste-management and minimise detrimental impacts are recent and piecemeal. At the same time, Covid-19 is impacting legislative and policy agendas, delaying progress on tackling plastics waste pollution and the shifts towards a Circular Economy. The network uses its diverse collective, expertise to explore these problems with particular reference to Australia, Brazil and the UK, in the context of progress towards the SDGs.

Project team

The project is a collaboration between the Universities of Surrey, São Paulo (USP) and Wollongong (UOW).

Our network creates a global research group from disciplines spanning law, business, public policy (Surrey/Wollongong), chemistry, bio-sciences, environmental engineering (Wollongong), business, environmental sciences and environmental policy (USP) creating a platform for sharing expertise and optimising our research potential tackling plastics pollution.