Author: Fiona Hatton

The group attended the Macro group UK’s Young Researchers Meeting YRM 2022 held at the University of Nottingham, 18-19th July. It was great to see the wide array of ongoing polymer research and meeting with other PhD students and early career researchers.

Everyone from the group gave presentations at the conference – well done to Ryan for winning a prize for his flash presentation and poster, to Sarah for giving her first conference talk, and to Ollie and Beth for presenting their posters. Caty from the Willcock group also won a prize for her talk. A very successful group outing and strong representation from Loughborough Materials!

Photo credits to the group and @YRM_2022 Twitter account

Fiona organised the Plastic waste and microplastics workshop in July, which was held at Loughborough University. The event featured invited speakers from academia and industry, a poster session for early career researchers, and ideas generation session to spark ideas and discussion, with a longer term aim of developing new collaborations. The event was a huge success with over 50 delegates attending and 8 poster presentations from PhD students, including Beth, Shadi and Imole from the Plastrax group. We had lots of discussion about current issues surrounding plastic waste in the environment and ways to address these issues.

In June 2022 Fiona, Ryan and Sarah attended the Bordeaux Polymer Conference 2022. Fiona gave a presentation and Ryan and Sarah both presented posters. With plenty of plenary, invited and contributed talks it was a fruitful conference and several poster sessions to fit in! The conference dinner was held in the most spectacular venue with so many interactive games to join in with before dinner. Looking forward to the next meeting!

Fiona and Ollie attended the 11th Workshop on Fats and Oils as Renewable Feedstock for the Chemical Industry in Dortmund, Germany in May 2022. Ollie gave his first poster presentation on his work with synthesising monomers from plant oils. It was an interesting meeting with excellent speakers, poster sessions and conference dinner – we’ll be back again for the next one!

Welcome to Beth who started her PhD in the group in October 2021!

Beth will be part of the PLASTRAX group, an interdisciplinary team, focussing on microplastics and nanoplastics.

In July 2021 Ollie and Ryan both joined the group.

Ollie has started a PhD focussed on polymerisation of monomers derived from renewable sources.

Ryan has joined us as a Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on the PPFTG project.

Welcome both!

Soon to have a few new additions to the group and a couple of summer student projects will start in the next few weeks.

After the last year it’s nice to see research getting off the ground again… watch this space!

Loughborough University has recently secured funding to tackle plastic waste in the UK. The PPFTG project will develop, prototype, and evaluate a novel circular business model that combines smart-technology enabled products and services to reduce the environmental, societal, and economic impact of food to go packaging.

Loughborough awarded £1m to research alternatives to single-use plastic packaging | Loughborough University (lboro.ac.uk)

The project is led by Dr Garrath Wilson, based in the Design School, with co-investigators Dr Rhoda Trimingham (Design School), Dr Elliot Woolley (Manufacturing Engineering) and Dr Fiona Hatton (Materials).

Fiona gave an invited talk at the Macro group UK Young Researchers Meeting 2020 which was held online 29-30th June. There were lots of great talks and posters from young researchers across the UK!