This symposium, supported by the Victoria and Albert Museum, was held to celebrate and disseminate the findings of the EU funded project, Preservation of Plastic ARTefacts (PopART). It brought together academics, artists, designers, manufacturers, conservators and curators to discuss the impact of plastics on art and design and their future potential in our lives. A thread running through the papers and discussion was eco design and sustainable use of plastics. Professor Richard Jones FRS, at the time of the symposium, was the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield. He is an experimental polymer physicist whose research interests include both polymer nanotechnology and the broader ethical and social implications of emerging technologies. He is the author of Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life, OUP, 2004, and talked about how new nanotechnologies based on polymers can learn from biology, under the title Soft machines: exploiting mutability and randomness in polymer nanotechnology.