SANDRA SMITH
Sustainability and the Future of Collections
Sandra Smith's talk focused on sustainability, particularly in the textiles and plastics industry. With the global outcry to ban single use plastics, fashion and household goods look set to be designed and made using materials with shorter lifetimes. This poses huge challenges to museums and conservators trying to preserve items to encapsulate life from the 21st Century. Manufacturing processes also need to be considered; for example, 3D Printed metals have a different metallurgic structure to those created by traditional heating. The conservator needs to develop new skills to understand, document, interpret and display items of today and in the future.
Smith's approach to sustainably dealing with 21st Century collection are:
- Real time / non-damaging analysis
- Bespoke nano systems for cleaning / monitoring / preservation
- Heritage research funding
- Green chemicals
Leaving this talk I felt that this not only related to items acquired by museums as part of their collections, but also the use of some of these technologies in object preservation.
