Pandemics, Plastics and Sustainability

Pandemics, Plastics and Sustainability

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the global economy and disrupted the waste, plastic, and recycling industries. While waste management, plastics production, and recycling sectors at first glance appear only tangentially linked to essential services, they are intimately connected to a thriving economy and critical public health roles.

As a result, more recyclables are being disposed of in the traditional waste processes. The behavior is additionally supported by drop in oil prices that makes manufacturing of the recyclable commodities cheaper. This challenges the goals of sustainability but also displays the deficiencies of short-term and product-based solutions to the plastics waste issue.

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About the author

Dr. Mariana Damova is the CEO of Mozaika, a company providing research and solutions in the field of data science, reasoning with natural language semantics, and natural human computer interfaces, creativity enhancing applications, and research infrastructures for the humanities. Previously, she was a Business development Manager and a Knowledge Management Expert specializing in ontology engineering and linked data management at a world leading technology provider. She was instrumental in the successful winning and knowledge modelling of large data integration and management projects such as the Semantic Knowledge Base for The National Archive of the United Kingdom and Research Space for the British Museum, as well as European FP7 projects such as Europeana Creative and Multisensor. Her work focuses on the design and development of data integration infrastructures which allow efficient querying, access and navigation over linked data. She has managed the building of the official experimental Europeana SPARQL endpoint holding Europeana semantic data. Mariana holds a PhD from the University of Stuttgart and teaches semantic technologies and multimedia at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. She regularly reviews books and articles for ACM ComputingReviews.com and has authored books and scientific articles in linguistics and semantic technologies. She has successfully lead international interdisciplinary teams and projects carrying technological risks, driven and managed change in engineering and operational contexts in North America and in Europe, and acquired the ability to leverage marketing requirements with knowledge intense technological solutions.

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