“The Product Lifetime and the Environment conference, more commonly known as ‘PLATE’, was organized in the beautiful setting of Aalto University in May-June 2023 (https://www.plateconference.org). So far, I haven’t been to conferences in my career as a doctoral researcher, so participating in PLATE was a really interesting opportunity! I was one of the authors in the paper presented by Professor Minna Autio, which dealt with consumer views on the effects of bio and synthetic dyes. The paper was presented in the “Colour and product lifetime” session led by the director of the BioColour research project, professor Riikka Räisänen. The session was particularly inspiring, because color-related research, especially from the perspective of a social scientist, is quite rare. Based on the session’s presentations, new ways of thinking about the production of colors and the industry connected to them opened up.
Conference presentations were given by several doctoral researchers from around the world. The conference turned out to be an excellent opportunity to create networks for yourself, as well as gather ideas for future lessons. On the other hand, you could draw ideas for your own research from the presentations, because interesting methods and materials were used in several papers.
When doing remote work, one sometimes feels a bit isolated. It was extremely inspiring to listen to the thoughts and stimulating speeches of young researchers working on the same topics related to sustainable production and consumption. Perhaps at next year’s Biocolours2024 conference (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/biocolours2024) it is time to hold my own, first conference presentation.”
Lotta Ruippo, doctoral researcher, University of Helsinki
There were 240 participants in the conference from 14 countries. The furthest participants came from Canada, USA, Brazil, Japan and Malaysia. All in all, there were 168 papers/presentations, 11 workshops and 3 exhibitions.
📷: Päivi Laaksonen, a mended shirt and several different types of mending techniques on display at the conference
