Plastics are among the defining materials of modern life. They have shaped design cultures, industrial processes, consumer practices, technological innovation, healthcare, domestic life, communication, fashion, and everyday material experience across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the same time, plastics are increasingly understood through their afterlives: as unstable materials, pollutants, objects of heritage conservation concern, and evidence of wider environmental, social, ethical, and policy challenges.

This themed collection takes plastic heritage as a critical starting point for examining what plastics leave behind materially, culturally, environmentally, and institutionally. Museum collections, archives, design collections, and heritage objects contain vital evidence of how plastics have been imagined, manufactured, used, repaired, degraded, discarded, and reinterpreted. Their marks of use, deterioration, residues, failures, and changing material states provide an important basis for understanding both the plastic age and its consequences.

The collection is aligned with the forthcoming PlastIC Symposium 2026, What Plastics Leave Behind: Practice, Curation and Innovation, hosted by the PlastIC Innovation + Curation Research Centre at Arts University Bournemouth, UK (Events - PlastIC Research Centre, AUB). However, it is conceived as a broader journal-led themed collection for Cambridge Prisms: Plastics, open to submissions from the wider international research and professional community. Invited contributions from keynote speakers, panellists, and invited experts will be considered alongside submissions received through the journal’s open call.

This themed collection aims to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on the conservation, curation, interpretation, and future implications of plastic heritage. It seeks to position plastic objects, collections, and material traces as active sites of knowledge production, where degradation, repair, instability, use, preservation, and disposal can inform broader debates about sustainability, design responsibility, environmental impact, health, policy, and material futures.

The collection will encourage dialogue between conservators, curators, heritage professionals, materials scientists, designers, historians, policy researchers, industry specialists, sustainability scholars, and others working across the cultural and material lives of plastics. Its goal is to move beyond narratives that frame plastics only as progress, convenience, pollution, or waste, and instead to examine how the study of plastic heritage can support more nuanced, ethical, and future-facing approaches to plastics in society.

Contributions may focus on, but are not limited to:

• Plastics as Cultural and Material Heritage. Understanding plastics as evidence of modern design, technology, consumption, industry and everyday life.
• What Plastics Leave Behind. Exploring the traces, residues, failures, repairs and material changes that plastic objects carry over time in a dual material culture that can “read” them as both waste and heritage.
• Practice: Caring for Polymeric Materials. Addressing the practical challenges of conserving plastic objects, including degradation, storage, monitoring and documentation.
• Curation: Interpreting the Plastic Age. Considering how museums narrate plastics beyond simple stories of progress, convenience, pollution or waste.
• Innovation: Learning from Past Materials. Using evidence from collections to inform future design, material selection and more sustainable plastic use.
• Ethics, Sustainability and Decision-Making. Asking what should be preserved, what may be allowed to change, and how museums make responsible choices with finite resources.
• Plastics, Health and Environmental Responsibility. Connecting plastic heritage to wider debates about toxicity, pollution, human health, environmental impact and social responsibility.
• Collections as Research Infrastructure. Positioning collections as sites of long-term evidence for polymer behaviour, material ageing and design consequences.
• From Heritage Practice to Future Policy and Industry. Exploring how conservation and curatorial knowledge can contribute to standards, design guidance, industrial practice, public understanding and policy discussions.

The themed collection welcomes a range of manuscript types, including research articles, review articles, perspective pieces, case studies, practice-led contributions, and shorter reflective or policy-facing papers. All submissions will be considered according to the journal’s usual editorial and peer-review processes.

Submission deadline: 1 December 2026

Guest Editors

Professor Christian McLening, Director PlastIC Innovation + Curation Research Centre, Director of Research and Innovation, Art University of Bournemouth, UK

Professor Yaneidys Arencibia Coloma, Co-Director PlastIC Innovation + Curation Research Centre, Arts University Bournemouth, UK, University of Manchester, UK