‘Plastics in Peril’ was originally planned by University of Cambridge Museums as an in-person conference to be held in March 2020 in Cambridge, UK. The global pandemic threw all plans out of the window and we found ourselves stuck at home in lockdown. The future of the meeting was very uncertain when the Leibniz Association of Research Museums in Germany contacted the Cambridge organisers to discuss their own plans for a conference on plastics conservation. In short, we decided to work together to host an online conference blending contributions from both meetings. This volume contains the 13 papers selected for the original in-person Cambridge conference, and they reflect many of the themes that came out in the wider joint meeting.