Event Details

Online webinar open to Lancaster University alumni, Executive MBA students and Lancaster MBA applicants.

Lancaster University alumni, Executive MBA students and MBA applicants are invited to join an online webinar with Dr Alison Stowell, Senior Lecturer in Management and Sustainability, and Associate Director for the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business.

In this webinar, Dr Stowell will consider how a circular economy - aimed at eliminating waste and the continual use of resources - might provide an answer to the growing problem of e-waste.

The amount of e-waste, i.e. discarded electronics and electrical equipment, is growing at a rapid rate due to a number of interactive phenomena, including global development, population increase, speed of innovation, cheaper consumable goods and diminishing non-renewable resources. In 2019 alone, the world generated over 50 million tonnes of e-waste. When we consider the cost of manufacturing electronic and electrical devices, the materials contained within them, the skills required to build and use them, it raises serious questions such as ‘Why do we discard them; Why are we not recapturing them; What alternatives are there?’.

Dr Stowell will provide an overview of a circular economy in the context of e-waste, including a look at the questions raised by current practices, as well as challenges, innovations and opportunities that management face when tackling this issue.

Event details:

Date: Wednesday 24 February 2021

Time: 12:00 - 13:00 GMT

Format: Live online Zoom event, with speaker presentation followed by time for Q&A.

Registration: Registration is essential. Registered attendees will receive a reminder email with joining instructions 48 hours before the event.

About the speaker:

Dr Alison Stowell is a Social Scientist interested in societal, management and organisational responses to waste; waste policy; values attributed to waste and waste as a particular type of work (collection, repair, reuse, recycling). Alison has been working on and led interdisciplinary projects ranging from attempts to quantify e-waste to exploring unreported e-waste flows to business and societal implications involved in flexible electronics. She is currently the project lead for Plastic Packaging in Peoples’ Lives: bridging the consumer attitude behaviour gap with the ambition to eliminate and reduce unnecessary plastic food packaging use in the UK. She has a sustained track record of securing funds from public and private bodies and her publication record reinforces her interdisciplinarity. Prior to becoming an academic she worked in both the public and private sector for 14 years and it was whilst at IBM that her interest in waste was galvanised.

This event is open to Lancaster University alumni, Executive MBA students and MBA applicants by invitation.