Over the past few years, the issue of ‘plastic waste’ has become a dominating concern in the UK and yet, so far, the problem has been met more with hysteria and ‘knee-jerk’ reaction, rather than with any reasoned, engineered and/or ethical response.

Indeed, like so many other important issues, dealing responsibly and sustainably with plastic waste has been largely ignored during the Covid-19 crisis with the result that some of the small improvements that had been made in the past few years have actually been reversed! This lecture starts from the standpoint that there is no clear definition of the term ‘plastic’ and that there are no ‘silver bullet’ solutions to the problem; however, our traditional (but unsustainable) solution of sending our plastic waste to the Far East, while claiming to have recycled it in the UK, is no longer an option available to us. So what can we now do that is both sustainable and responsible?

Our speaker is Prof. Ian Arbon CEng CEnv Senior Partner, Engineered Solutions

Ian Arbon is a Chartered Mechanical Engineer and a Chartered Environmentalist, with an MSc in Renewable Energy and the Environment and an MBA. Having been MD of several engineering-sector companies (Howden Compressors, Caledonian Compressors, Peter Brotherhood), he now runs Engineered Solutions, a Sustainable Engineering & Management Consultancy. Ian is a Fellow of IMechE, where he has chaired the Energy, Environment & Sustainability Group; he has over 40 years of international experience with Energy from Waste (EfW) and spearheads IMechE’s ‘Waste as a Resource’ work. Ian is also a Fellow of ASME, the Energy Institute and Institute of Refrigeration and is a Member of Council of IESIS. He is an Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Energy Policy at the University of Strathclyde.

• Joining details will be issued on registration

• Duration - the talk will last approx 50 mins followed by Q and A

• GMT - UK time

• Presentation will be delivered by Zoom, system requirements for Zoom are:

macOS or Windows OS hardware requirements:2.5 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 or higher desktop CPU (single screen) processor.2.8 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 or higher desktop CPU (dual or triple screen) processor.Dual-bank RAM for better performance.

• This lecture will be recorded