SUSTAINABILITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT: SUBJECT HEADING INTRODUCTION HERE?
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Britain’s
burning
question
STORY BY AUTHOR NAME HERE
Clarion call
for a plastics
revolution
When the first production
line was conceived and
installed to mass-produce
pulley blocks for the Royal
Navy in the latter stages
of the Napoleonic Wars,
it placed Portsmouth at
the start of the Industrial
Revolution. Today,
Portsmouth is leading
another revolution – a
uniquely modern revolution
to change the world's
relationship with plastic.
REPORT BY BRAD COLLIS
The historic island city of Portsmouth
on the shores of the Solent is about
to become home to a communityembedded
research programme to rein
in one of the twentieth century’s most pervasive
technologies: plastic.
Teams of scientists have been assembled by the
University of Portsmouth to engender a paradigm
shift in the manufacture, use and disposability of this
seductively convenient but pervasively polluting oilbased
material, which has generated a contamination
crisis on land and at sea.
Revolution Plastics, as the programme has been
dubbed, has set out to create a new plastics economy
based on improved recyclability, policy support from
all tiers of government, and community engagement
to achieve behavioural change in the use of plastics.
It is part of the University’s overarching vision to turn
Portsmouth into a community-supported ‘sustainability
hub’ that will accumulate knowledge, experience and
data to become a global model.
PHOTO: 123RF
ISSUE 1 / 2020
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