Second life: understanding deterioration of recycled plastics in Museum collections

This project will focus on understanding the deterioration of recycled plastics in museums, with the purpose of defining a long-term mitigation strategy. Recycled plastic materials started to be used more extensively in the past two decades; with drives to increase global sustainability across design, more of these objects will enter the V&A collection. As the planet's climate changes and the V&A creates lighter and brighter gallery spaces, there is an
urgent need to evaluate the risks to objects containing recycled plastics and establish measures toward their preservation. We will employ experimental and computational mechanics methods to investigate chemical and mechanical degradation in these materials and the potential interaction between these. Experimental studies will determine the physical and mechanical properties of the plastics as a function of ageing. These properties will be used as input to novel computational models, to derive predictions of the plastics' lifetime under various environments.