Rethinking Plastics Pollution Post-Pandemic

Biography

Noreen O'Meara is connected to several research centres in Surrey Law School, including Surrey Centre for International and Environmental Law (SCIEL), SCLP, and the Centre for Great Power Competition, and to the Centre for Britain and Europe (CBE). She is a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow advancing her research on national, EU and international dimensions of environmental governance. Since 2025, she has held the Synnott Family Chair in European Union Law at University College Cork (UCC).

She read Law at the University of Cambridge (Corpus Christi College) and UCL (LLM (Public Law) and did her PhD research at Queen Mary, University of London. She has also completed non-degree studies at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Université Paris-1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and RADA. She previously worked as a research fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) and in practice at the European Commission's Legal Service and the Court of Justice of the European Union (cabinet, Advocate General Sharpston). Her work focused on infringement actions against Member States and cases in a broad range of areas of EU law, including data protection, taxation, extradition and environmental law.

At the University of Surrey, she focused her research on European law and human rights, developing particular expertise on rights and the environment, environmental pollution and the evolution of human rights protection in Europe. She led and developed courses on EU Law, Law and Climate Change, and European Human Rights Law.

Visiting positions include: Sutherland Fellow (UCD), The Institute of European and Comparative Law (IECL, University of Oxford), iCourts (University of Copenhagen), Trinity College Dublin, during which time she joined the Editorial Board of the Irish Journal of European Law (IJEL). She is also a Visiting Professor at Stockholm University, a Research Affiliate at UCD Earth and an Affiliate researcher at the Exeter Centre for Environmental Law (ExCEL).

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Biography

I am an environmental lawyer and I specialise in looking at the ways law can be used to protect the environment.  Recently I have been working on the 'wicked problem' of the polluting waste from plastics and how a circular economy might help to stop the problem of waste.  So I look at laws around the ecodesign of products and how they can be implemented to stop the production of waste and pollution.  I look at the whole governance frameworks for environmental law including not just the legislation but policy, implementation, enforcement and compliance as well as the impact of property rights. I have been working on the rights to water and sanitation and how they can be used to ensure a decent standard of living for people especially in developing countries.  I believe that we will not solve the problem of the degradation of the earth unless we work across disciplines seeking solutions together so I specialise in multidisciplinary research working with social and natural scientists and engineers.

I am the Director of the Environmental Regulatory Research Group (http://www.surrey.ac.uk/errg/) which is a research grouping of individuals and organisations engaged in research, teaching and consultancy into environmental regulation, compliance and enforcement and is part of the Surrey Centre for International and Environmental Law.

I am an associate member of the Centre for Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey and I also practice as a barrister from Guildford Chambers.

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