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The partnership between the University of Birmingham and Stan's Cafe Theatre Company has brought together artists and researchers across multiple disciplines to collaborate on bringing plastics policy research to life.

The Many Lives of PET #1 grew from early conversations on how the complicated issue of sustainable plastics and polymers could be conveyed to new audiences beyond the academic community. This partnership therefore built on the strengths of both organisations and The Many Lives of PET #1, a table-top drama about the lifecycle of a plastic bottle, was born. 

Researchers at the University of Birmingham contributed robust, evidence-based insights into plastics and their social and environmental implications, while Stan’s Cafe drew on their creative expertise to translate this research into engaging school workshop exercises, utilising inputs from students to create an innovative table-top style performance for community audiences. By combining academic rigour with imaginative storytelling, the partnership showed how collaboration across research and the arts can make complex issues easier to understand and spark wider public reflection, dialogue, and social impact. 

Feedback includes ‘informative, thought-provoking, provocative’ and ‘the urgency and size of the problem was well conveyed’ while schools reflect that the show ‘made it really clear there isn’t an easy fix or a right answer, but there are pros and cons to all decisions when we’re thinking about living more sustainably’.

If we want to achieve broad, real-world impact, it is important that we work together across disciplinary boundaries.

Andrew Dove

Q&A

Why is this work so important and exciting? 

University of Birmingham: Creating a sustainable future for plastics is a complex challenge that will require a lot of different parts of society to come together to solve: science and engineering discoveries are at the core, with collaboration with industry required to make them real. Much of the driver for change either comes economically, or through insightful policy interventions that help drive system design. At the core of all of this are citizens, who will be a key aspect of the implementation of any system that is designed. Bringing together these aspects of this challenge is hugely exciting. It took some in-depth and complex research and communicated it to the public in a way that was easy to understand and left them with a take home message of the importance of the topic as well as their role in the solution. The production from Stan’s Cafe was first class, it didn't shy away from complexity and found excellent and accessible ways to communicate fundamental scientific aspects of the challenges that we face in this field. It's a shame that we have only been able to bring the show to the Birmingham area rather than being national!

What different strengths did different people bring to the team? 

Stan's Cafe: This project was built on The Sustainable Plastics Policy Commission report, written by The Birmingham Plastics Network. The expertise that informed this report was a real strength of this project and allowed us to build a truly informative but also engaging show. This allowed us at Stan’s Cafe to use our creative talents to build something truly informative and evidence-based, but also engaging and fun. 

Beyond the development of the show itself, the team benefitted from its diversity, with project manager Robyn Macpherson inputting the creative vision to suggest commissioning Stan’s Cafe for the adaptation for the stage, and Kit Windows-Yule demonstrating remarkable fundraising skills to make the whole thing possible. The wider team contributed excellent organisational, communication, and teamwork skills in collaborating to devise and deliver a series of workshops in schools. Finally, we are grateful to Joshua Cubed, who supported a series of short form videos for social media.

How important would you say collaboration is for producing high quality science/work? How has collaboration influenced your work? 

University of Birmingham: Collaboration is absolutely vital for high quality work of all kinds, but especially for science. Academic knowledge is typically deep, but seldom broad – as the old saying goes: ‘An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing’. As such, if we want to achieve broad, real-world impact, it is important that we work together across disciplinary boundaries.

The Many Lives project is characterised by boundary-crossing collaboration at multiple levels: the scientific underpinnings of the project were developed by a team including PhD chemical engineers, chemists, and physicists. The Policy Commission, on which the production was based, involved cooperation between academics, industry, and Government. The project was jointly funded by industry (Lenovo) and learned societies (the Royal Society and the Royal Society of ÉîÒ¹¸£Àû¹ú²ú¾«Æ·). And, of course, the final product involved close partnership between the arts and the sciences, and was interwoven with knowledge developed from our interactions with underprivileged schoolchildren from across the Midlands during the initial outreach phase of the project. By engaging with such a broad and diverse cross-section of society, we were able to create a piece of theatre that could meaningfully speak to everyone which, I believe, was one of the project’s greatest strengths.

In what ways does creativity influence how you think about or carry out your work? 

University of Birmingham: Creativity is central to the Birmingham Plastics Network; the open-minded and interdisciplinary approach of the BPN, and its genuine support for new ideas and perspectives, allows for the development of creative methods for project design, impact, engagement and change. This is what led the BPN to the idea of turning the BPN Policy Commission on Sustainable Plastics into theatre. Rather than presenting findings solely through reports and briefings, we wanted to explore how embodied storytelling could make the trade-offs and lived consequences of plastics policies clear to communities who are usually excluded from these conversations. 

More broadly, creative thinking influences how the BPN approaches collaborative processes and manages change and uncertainty. It helps us to bring together diverse partners and make spaces for experimentation, reflection and meaningful engagement, while remaining agile and output-focused, all of which are integral to interdisciplinary research and, more specifically, approaches to sustainable plastics futures.