2010 News
- News Archive
Eco-Friendly Plastics Seminar Held
A two day seminar which will look at how new plastics for food packaging can be created to reduce waste and limit damage to both health and the environment is taking place from this week at the Centre for Bioethics and Emerging Technologies, St Mary’s University College, Twickenham.
Polymer scientists, chemical engineers, environmentalists and policy experts from seventeen countries have gathered to explore how nanotechnology may be the answer to these important questions.
The Centre’s director, Prof Geoffrey Hunt, who is a specialist in the ethics of new technologies, explained that nanotechnology is the engineering of a matter at a very small scale.
He said today: “Scientists can now manipulate matter at a scale much smaller than bacteria. This gives them tremendous power to create new materials with almost any properties that they want.”
This means they can avoid the damaging effects of some of the old chemistry and physics to create novel food packaging plastics which are stronger, lighter, keep food fresh for longer, are easier to recycle and non-toxic, and which reduce the overall use of plastics packaging.
He added: “Plastics from food packaging are a major environmental problem, damaging eco-systems and affecting human health, sometimes in subtle long-term ways which are difficult to reverse.
“But there is a catch: novel polymer nanomaterials could introduce new problems, unless this time we think ahead with careful risk-assessments”.
The seminar is funded by two EU sources: Cooperation on Science and Technology (COST) and Framework Programme Seven (FP7), in which St Mary’s is a partner.
