Many Happy Returns – Communicating Reusability to Mitigate Single-Use Plastic Dependency
The University of Sheffield’s ‘Many Happy Returns’ project is a UKRI-SSPP-funded, highly interdisciplinary research project combining linguistics, environmental & behavioural sciences to understand what it takes to make reusable packaging systems successful, with the aim of reducing our reliance upon single-use plastic.
In this presentation, representatives from our Linguistics & Geography work packages (WP1 & WP2) will share our innovative research approaches, our findings to date, & our interdisciplinary research collaborations across the entire project.
In WP1 we are conducting comparative corpus-assisted discourse analysis of public-facing & consumer-generated discourse around the topic of plastic reuse, informed by critical theory from Cognitive Linguistics, Stylistics, & Argumentation. Our corpus of public-facing discourse contains relevant council guidance, retailer documents, blog posts, campaign materials, & responses to our industry survey. Our consumer-discourse corpus consists of focus group transcripts & relevant social media posts from a variety of platforms. We use this to, for example, gain a better understanding of consumer rationale by, for instance, closely examining sentences containing the conjunction ‘but’ or ‘would’+’if’ conditional statements.
In WP2, we are conducting a series of household engagements in which we pay attention to how everyday behaviours associated with & connected to packaging (e.g., shopping, transportation, unpacking & storing, meal preparation, disposal) are (re)negotiated when reusing packaging. Engaging with a mixture of methodologies including: observations (‘shop-alongs’, kitchen tours), diary activities, and conversational & more formal interviews, we observe the flow of packaging from store to citizen disposal. In doing so, we draw attention to how particular objects are requalified according to a number of rationales & motivations, which extend beyond common perceptions of environmental & sustainability concerns.
We will demonstrate our uniquely effective approach to combine our analysis of the “big picture” through examining a representative sample of real-world sustainability discourse, with highly involved action research in which we are part of the conversation, gaining insights at the source. Finally, we will be addressing our outreach activities to involve the University of Sheffield campus population & the wider public, such as collaborating with artists to communicate the research in innovative ways at the Festival of the Mind.