
How do you treat plastic waste in your home? Are you a good consumer? A good recycler or a wishcycler? And is recycling the first thing you see when you open the door to your house?
Professors Alex Skandalis and James Cronin bring their marketing and consumer culture expertise to the Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives project – and to the podcast – to analyse consumer behaviours around plastic. But are they just making up all of the language and concepts they mention?
From the Aztecs to the Dark Ages, the Victorians to the present day, we discover plastics have been around our culture for much longer than you might think and go far beyond drinks bottles and food containers.
Discover a shift from plastic as an environmental saviour to a major sustainability problem, from a luxury item to something almost invisible in its ubiquity, and how the material is intrinsic to our modern-day society.
See how the PPiPL team have looked at household behaviours – from their shopping habits to their plastic disposal routines – how actions around recycling at home and at work affect each other; and how individual choices and behaviours are shaped by many factors around you.
And we find out the answer to the key question about whether Ancient Egyptians used plastics to wrap their mummies.
Read more about consumer attitudes and behaviours towards plastics here: https://doc.your-brochure-online.co.uk/Lancaster-University_FiftyFourDegrees_Issue_21/18/
And read the PPiPL white paper on household recycling here: https://zenodo.org/records/10839795
Transforming Tomorrow
Sustainability is a key consideration for any contemporary business, from biodiversity to modern slavery, seabeds to factory floors. On Transforming Tomorrow, we’ll guide you through the complex, ever-changing and often exciting (yes, really!!) world of sustainability in business. Alongside members of the Pentland Centre, academic experts, and business leaders, we cover the theory and practice of mainstreaming social and environmental sustainability into purposeful business strategy and performance.
Whether you are leading change in your business, or just want to know more about how asteroid mining may influence the future of sustainability, Transforming Tomorrow is the show for you.
Taking you through it all are your hosts, Jan and Paul, who bring insight, perspective, and not a little amount of disagreement, to all the subjects.
Join us every Monday to uncover new insights and become a little more inspired that you can make a difference in sustainability.
You can find transcripts for most episodes at: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/pentland/resources-for-education-and-practice/transforming-tomorrow-podcast/transcripts/
Send your questions on any of the issues we discuss in Transforming Tomorrow to [email protected] or fill in our feedback form here: https://forms.office.com/e/7Bw4rDiRDt
Find out more about the Pentland Centre and its work here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/pentland/
https://doc.your-brochure-online.co.uk/Lancaster-University_Transforming-Tomorrow/
Meet the Hosts

Professor Jan Bebbington is the Director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business at Lancaster University. Jan is an expert on accounting, benchmarking (to her co-host’s annoyance), and how business and sustainability intersect.
Jan loves nature and wants to protect it – and hopes she can change the world (ideally for the better). She is also motivated to address inequality wherever it is found and especially to eliminate forced, bonded or child labour. Transforming Tomorrow is one small step on that quest.

Paul Turner is a former sports journalist who now works promoting the research activities in Lancaster University Management School – a poacher turned gamekeeper as his former colleagues would have it.
Paul has always been interested in nature and the natural environment – it comes from growing up in Cumbria – and has been a vocal proponent of the work of the Pentland Centre since joining Lancaster University. He does not like rankings and benchmarking, and is not afraid to say so.