Services
Our services are centred around intellectual property that can be registered. We protect innovation, design, and branding across all sectors of industry, and at all stages in the supply chain.
For each IP right we offer services covering strategic advice, pre-registration searches, registrations and renewals, oppositions and dispute resolution. We handle work throughout the world, working with local colleagues in over 100 countries.
Sectors
Our attorneys specialise in one or more sectors of industry, which enables them to provide quality advice with a commercial focus.
Our patent specialists have detailed understanding of the background technology, which ensures that your patent applications are prepared with the correct scope, reducing the likelihood of challenges from third parties and objections from the patent office.
They also advise whether other forms of protection would be more appropriate. Our brand specialists work with brand managers for leading brands and their advice is commercially focussed making sure that you get the best value from your budget.
Sectors
If you have visited a coffee outlet, or treated yourself to a takeaway this week, you may have noticed something. Your drink should not have come in a polystyrene cup, and your meal should not have come with plastic cutlery.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently caused a stir when he announced to a room full of schoolchildren that recycling plastic ”doesn’t work” (reported here). The PM’s comments upset some, but he did have a point. According to Sian Sutherland, A Plastic Planet co-founder, “less than 10% [of plastic waste] is actually recycled in the UK. Despite being touted by industry as a solution to the problem, all it has done is justify overproduction” (reported here).
Plastic is great. It’s cheap, strong, lightweight, durable, waterproof, doesn’t break down easily… the list goes on. Its diverse range of properties lends itself to many applications. However, the exceptional durability of plastic is something of a double edged sword. In order to meet the high demand for plastic we produce over 300 million tonnes of it per year, much of which ends up in landfill, the oceans and even our bodies.
We have previously looked at a variety of innovations which could replace plastic packaging and prevent plastic from ending up in the ocean. There is no doubt that innovation is key to solving the plastic problem; however, innovators are faced with an additional challenge when researching and developing an idea. This is because it must be taken into consideration that the benefits of innovations will only be realised if they are readily adopted by the wider public. To stimulate innovation which fits with people’s existing behaviour patterns, or is consciously designed to encourage and facilitate changes in behaviour, Innovate UK has recently opened a new funding competition entitled “Designing sustainable plastic solutions”.
We previously reported on how technology which aims to end plastic pollution could be protected with patents and how a genetically modified enzyme capable of breaking down plastic is the subject of a patent application. While technology to improve how our plastic waste is managed is clearly important it only represents part of the story. What if we didn’t need to use the plastic in the first place? All over the world, innovators are working to end our penchant for polymers.
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