Domestic ‘Disposal Work’ and Plastics Recycling – Unwrapping Everyday Entanglements of Practice,Roles,and Responsibilities

Abstract

This article is about household plastics recycling in England. Rates of recycling have stagnated across the country over the past decade. Fitting with an individualisation of responsibility across industry and policy, households commonly get the blame. We bring this framing into question through a conceptualisation and exploration of the ‘disposal work’ undertaken by households. This concerns the bundle of practices involved in the identification, preparation, and segregation of everyday discards. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research, involving a purposefully disruptive trial and 60 interviews, we consider what affects disposal work, unwrapping a series of everyday sociomaterial entanglements of practice and the constitutive roles played by bins, packaging, and lay normativities. We argue that the blame attributed to households for poor-quality recycling reflects a blinkered problem framing and an oversimplification of responsibilities. Our argument is premised on tracing out and revealing a set of relationships between practices and domains of work that intersect in and extend out beyond homes and help shape the ebb and flow of plastic recyclables. Several pragmatic responses aimed at improving matters are discussed. We also signpost this article’s broader significance for sociological research on practices and sustainability, arguing that privileging work, over consumption, provides one means of attuning and attending to power dynamics and the politics of the everyday.

Introduction – plastic problems and recycling

Plastic pollution is ‘among the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st century’ (OECD, 2023a: 5). It is rightly receiving an increasing amount of attention in social science research, with fears concerning environmental harm skilfully married up with discussions on inequality, injustice, health, and toxicity (Abrahms-Kavunenko, 2023; Gabrys et al., 2013; Liboiron, 2016; Mah, 2022). As opposed to being treated as the solitary remit of environmental scientists, plastic pollution is thus appropriately seen and accepted as a pressing sociological and societal concern. Current struggles within the United Nations (UN) to reach an intergovernmental treaty to end plastic pollution accept the latter point and signal an awareness that cross-cutting global responses are necessitated (Cowan et al., 2024).

Coming after reduction and reuse, recycling has long been a favoured solution to plastic pollution (Mah, 2022). Despite this, it is estimated that a measly 9% of global plastic waste was recycled in 2019 (OECD, 2023b). Even in countries where recycling rates are higher than the global average, problems persist. In England (where the empirical research that underpins this article was conducted), household recycling rates have stagnated around 45% since 2013 (Defra, 2022). Contamination, whereby the wrong or overly dirty recyclables get put in domestic recycling collections, forms part of the issue (WRAP, 2020). Problems endure regardless of the government’s awareness that it needs to ‘drive better quantity and quality in recycling’ (Defra, 2018: 9).

To date, responses have commonly seen households spotlighted. As Liboiron and Lepawsky (2022: 7) note, despite its marginal position when cast in the context of industrial throughputs, ‘“waste” in the environmental movement has come to mean “household waste,” which in turn directs environmental action towards changing consumer behaviors’. This fits with a broader ‘individualization of responsibility’ (Maniates, 2001: 33), which is distilled in a ‘long-standing corporate narrative that holds individual consumers responsible for plastic waste’ (Mah, 2022: 68). As Clapp (2012) writes, ‘the right to choose a product and responsibly to properly dispose of its packaging, in industry’s view, belongs with the individual consumer’ (p. 200). If only householders knew better, made the right choices, and behaved appropriately – so the argument goes – problematic waste generation, littering, and contamination would decline, and rates of recycling improve. Research focused on ‘nudging’ behaviour follows (Lakshmi et al., 2022; Schill and Shaw, 2016). Yet problems persist, suggesting that the blame attributed to households and ongoing efforts aimed at changing behaviour, though well intentioned, are misplaced.

Recognising this, we are inspired to reframe debate on domestic recycling, taking seriously Nielsen et al.’s (2020) call to focus on the ‘norms and practices that maintain the role of plastics in society’ (p. 14). Drawing together ideas from sociologies of consumption, waste, and sustainability, we build on a common thread of conceptualisation, whereby social practices, over individual actors, with proclivities to rational action, underwrite unsustainable ways of consuming and wasting (Scheurenbrand et al., 2024; Shove and Spurling, 2013). Shove et al.’s (2012: 82) ‘deliberately slim-line version of practice theory’, which draws together ideas from a corpus of social theory, sees practices comprised materials, meanings, and competences. Practices are social because they are shared and have lives beyond those of individual actors.

Over the past two decades, theories of practice have informed a glut of writing on consumption. Food, mobility, and energy demand have garnered much attention (cf. Cass and Faulconbridge, 2015; Rinkinen et al., 2021; and Foden et al., 2022). Bar a few exceptions, waste recycling has received less attention (Barr et al., 2013; Hargreaves, 2011). Where it has, domestic plastics recycling and the work that underpins this have not proven explicit areas of study. This is understandable given the topical specificity. Though it also fits with a tendency of practice-based sustainability research to focus on consumption over work – and in so doing lean towards reproducing an arguably all too neat and tidy distinction between practices of consuming and producing (Evans, 2020; Warde, 2022). Even in rare and commendable examples of practice-inspired sustainability research that engages with work, it is the effects of working practices and workplace arrangements concerning the consumption of goods and services that are privileged (Cass and Shove, 2018; Hargreaves, 2011) – not production and the (re)circulation and (re)valorisation of resources. Domestic recycling poses a conceptual quandary here – should it be conceptualised as consumption or production, or a mixture of the two and comprising practices? This is not a trivial question. Depending on the response, different accounts of the influences associated with producing quality recyclables will take shape.

Wheeler and Glucksmann’s (2013, 2015); writing on ‘consumption work’ suggests the latter response to the stated quandary is most appropriate. ‘Consumption work’ is that which is ‘necessary for the purchase, use, reuse and disposal of consumption goods and services’ (Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015: 533). The authors’ show that householders’ consumption work is crucial to recycling (Wheeler, 2014; Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2013; Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015). They do not, however, write in detail about the sequencing of consumption work and accompanying everyday practices in detail and as part of bringing into question the roles and responsibilities tied up with plastics recycling. Their writing suggests, nonetheless, that multiple practices and domains of work are entangled and at play.

It is in response to the question of constitutive roles and responsibilities that we bridge between ideas of practice and consumption work, introducing the concept of ‘disposal work’. This is the labour involved in: the identification (i.e. the assessment of what materials are made of); the preparation (i.e. the cleaning and separation of packaging); and the segregation of items (i.e. the assignment of waste to bins). Borrowing from Shove et al. (2012: 81), disposal work forms a practice ‘bundle’. It is a ‘loose-knit [pattern] based on the co-location and co-existence of practices’. Based on our conceptual framing, exploring disposal work promises to shed light on the power dynamics wrapped up with domestic recycling.

Our exploration of disposal work draws on in-depth qualitative research with 30 households. This involved a disruptive trial – whereby participants were provided a 240-litre bin for all plastics – and 60 interviews. We draw attention to the effects packaging, bins, and socially shared notions of cleanliness have regarding domestic recycling. We show that the disposal work performed by households signals a ‘constitutive entanglement’, seeing ‘a mangling of human and material agencies (Pickering, 1995) and what Suchman (2007) terms: “a creative sociomaterial assemblage”’ (cited in Orlikowski, 2007: 1440). These entanglements mean agencies are distributed and emergent of relationships between working practices to do with, among others, packaging design, retailing, household recycling, waste collection, and processing. It is neither appropriate nor helpful, in turn, to blame households for poor quality recycling. Indeed, attention switches away from ‘who’ is to blame to ‘how’ persistent problems are manifest and how matters could be rebundled otherwise.

As part of shifting debate in this direction, we contribute to efforts aimed at meeting the challenge of developing ‘concepts and methods that can help grasp how arrangements and associations of practices and the heterogeneous flows they are bound with are produced through, and reproduce, systematic inequities in capacities to act’ (Watson, 2017: 179). It has been argued that accounts of ‘politics, power and political economy’ are ‘noticeably absent’ (Geels et al., 2015: 10) in much sustainability research premised on theories of practice (Soron, 2019). As we show, attuning to the conduct of work, however mundane – both in terms of what is done and what shapes doing – provides one means of practice-oriented research meeting the challenge of attending to ‘the links between everyday life and political economy’ (Evans, 2020: 342).

Household recycling – responsibility and disposal work

The study of waste is not new in the social sciences (Thompson, 1979). There has, however, been a concentrated coalesce of writing over the past two decades or so. This has led to the demarcation of ‘waste studies’, a corpus of research with diverse empirical, theoretical, and methodological roots (Gille and Lepawsky, 2022). Variety acknowledged, scholars hold in common an understanding that waste is made and that this making and associated work is emergent of sociomaterial practices (Gille and Lepawsky, 2022). Hawkins (2005) captures an overarching sentiment, describing ‘putting out the garbage [as . . .] an organized sequence of material practices that deploys certain technologies, bodily techniques, and assumptions’ (pp. 1–2). Waste is suitably recognised as a ‘dynamic social category that needs to be understood in relation to the contexts through which it has been put to work and the relationships in which it is embedded’ (Evans, 2012: 1123).

Fleshing out shared concerns, several studies followed in the wake of EU environmental policies rolled out in the 1990s (Bulkeley and Gregson, 2009; Davoudi, 2000; Gregson, 2009). The policies aimed at limiting landfilling for fear of environmental degradation. The 1999 EU Landfill Directive proved influential (Bulkeley and Gregson, 2009). Non-compliance carried heavy financial penalties. In the United Kingdom, where over 80% of waste was landfilled in 1999 (Gregson, 2009), ‘a root and branch transformation of municipal waste infrastructure was required’ (Gregson and Forman, 2021: 214). Many materials previously destined for landfill, including food stuffs and those made of paper, plastic, glass, and metal, needed to be diverted to other ends. Subsequently, households have been enrolled in new ‘waste regimes’ (Gille, 2007: 9) – sociomaterial, cultural, political, and economic contexts of waste generation, sorting, collection, and disposal. Thanks largely to the political devolution of waste management, over time different waste regimes have popped up across the United Kingdom.

In England, there are an estimated 210 waste collection authorities (WCAs), 29 waste disposal authorities, and 94 unitary authorities involved in the collection and processing of household discards (personal correspondence with Defra, August 2023). Differences include those to do with the materials collected, how these should be sorted and segregated, and how this work should be done (i.e. rinsing packaging, removing or leaving lids on, doing the same with labels or not). Collection schedules and accompanying household waste infrastructure, including receptacles, be these bins, boxes, and/or bags, which can come in varying combinations, shapes, colours, and sizes, add to the complexity. Households are thus chained up with various systems of waste diversion and divisions of labour (Wheeler, 2014; Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2013, 2015).

Wheeler and Glucksmann’s (2013, 2015) conceptualisation of ‘consumption work’ and empirically grounded research explicitly acknowledges the importance of householder labour for the functioning of recycling regimes. As noted, consumption work is a broad concept, referring to the labour involved in the purchasing, (re)use, and disposal of consumable services and goods. Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015: 552) write the following on recycling: ‘by sorting their waste, consumers initiate a new economic process, providing feedstock (such as metals, plastics, and paper) which in turn creates jobs/profits within the recycling, processing and manufacturing industries’. Moreover, ‘without the input and effort of consumers’, recycling targets ‘will be impossible to meet’ (Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2013: 1). Given this, it is unsurprising that ‘as governments pledge to increase their recycling rates, the household or the consumer becomes an important target for policy interventions’ (Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2013: 1).

Sociological writing on disposal indicates, however, that the targeting of households is flawed. Indeed, existing research, including that of Wheeler and Glucksmann (2013), suggests there is an entanglement of domains of labour, practices, and associated roles and responsibilities at play when recycling is conducted. Chappells and Shove (1999) show, for example, how the changing design of bins reconfigures everyday practices and the distribution of duties for sorting household waste. Alexander et al.’s (2009) evidence how building type and infrastructural connections affect household recycling. Moral norms and everyday lay normativities to do with, inter alia, gender, sustainability, frugality, cleanliness, and convenience, have also been shown to shape household disposal (Bulkeley and Gregson, 2009; Wheeler, 2014; Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2013; Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015). Plastic packaging is, moreover, not an inert feature of everyday life. It ‘presents its materiality as something to be experienced and negotiated’ (Hawkins, 2010: 127), compelling practices of disposal in and beyond the home (Hirth et al., 2021; Shittu, 2023).

Building on the research, ideas, and arguments outlined, it makes sense to conceptualise and explore the details and dynamics of domestic disposal work and associated practices as a means of revealing the constitutive roles and responsibilities embroiled with plastics recycling. Sticking with common conceptual threads, disposal work can be appropriately conceptualised as a bundle of loosely knit, co-located, and co-existing sociomaterial practices (Shove et al., 2012). For analytical purposes, aligned with the empirical context, concerns, and findings of this article, the bundle can be taken to include practices of identification (i.e. figuring out what materials are made of), preparation (cleaning, separating, or leaving items as they are), and segregation (the assignment of things to bins). This framing speaks to aspects of the diversity of influences captured in existing literature on household disposal. Examining disposal work and therefore the bundle of practices it comprises provides a specific means of revealing the roles and responsibilities wrapped up with domestic plastics recycling.

Research context and methodology

This article is an outcome of a 3-year interdisciplinary research project on UK plastic recycling. The project set out to explore the implications of asking householders to put anything they identify as plastic into a single bin. This article draws on insights from the social science work package, which focused analysis on households and everyday practice.

The findings presented specifically relate to a purposively disruptive trial conducted with 30 households in the same waste collection authority (WCA) area. While theories of practice do not prescribe a simple set of methods (Gherardi, 2019), the (broadly taken) collective ontological precept of practice leads to a shared understanding that disruptions to the regular flow of everyday life spotlight the routine, tacit, and taken-for-granted. The trial we conducted acted to disrupt household recycling in a way that shed unique light on the enactment of disposal work and how participants dealt with and helped to produce waste resources. Other methods (i.e. surveys, single interviews) would likely not have elicited the type or degree of detail we were able to achieve by disturbing the status quo. Consequently, our research design feeds into methodological debates on social practices, interventions, and sustainability (Strengers and Maller, 2014). It does so by demonstrating how a relatively mundane intervention, which arguably tweaked rather than radically altered practice, can act to generate reflective engagement and thought on the part of participants and relatedly nuanced research findings (we plan to write more on this in a forthcoming paper).

In practice, the trial involved giving households an additional brown 240-litre bin to put anything they identified as plastic in. As per the rules employed in the research area, each household had the following four bins: (1) a black 240-litre bin for dry mixed recycling – cans and tins, glass, foil, and plastic bottles – collected every 4 weeks; (2) a green 240-litre bin for food and garden waste, collected weekly; (3) a blue 240-litre paper and card bin, collected every 4 weeks; and (4) a slimline 140-litre grey general waste bin, collected fortnightly and containing items that are not collected for recycling (e.g. plastic bags, pots, tubs, and trays; baby nappies; crisp packets; broken glass). Households are also asked: to rinse their recyclables, to make the sorting process cleaner for operatives and less detrimental to infrastructure; encouraged to squash cans and plastic bottles to save space in their dry recycling bins; and to remove lids from plastic bottles, as these too easily slip through the revolving teeth that help separate plastic and glass at the materials recovery facility (MRF), meaning the latter waste stream gets contaminated. Business as usual – good plastics recycling thus includes rinsed plastic bottles, lids removed. With regard to our research trial, good quality included any type of plastic being put in the additional bin provided. These are very different measures of quality. As our empirical analysis shows, however, both are affected by the roles that plastic packaging, cleanliness, and bins play in everyday practice and unfolding disposal work.

Prior to the delivery of the trial bin to households, a semi-structured interview was undertaken. These generally took an hour and considered how households conducted recycling, consumption practices, and thoughts on plastic packaging, current waste policy and protocols. After the 2-week period and having completed an analysis of what was put in the trial bins, we conducted another set of interviews with each household, also lasting on average an hour. These covered thoughts and experiences having completed the trial (e.g. what was surprising); discussion of findings based on our analysis of the contents of bins; and the possible benefits and pitfalls of giving every household one bin for all waste plastic.

Though 30 households were engaged, 42 people were directly involved in the interviewing process, with 12 of the interviews undertaken with couples. Of the 60 interviews, 48 took place in person, mostly at people’s homes and on occasion at a community centre. Those undertaken within homes provided useful opportunities to talk in situ of where disposal work was conducted. The remaining 12 took place over the phone or online. The ongoing repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic meant some felt unable to meet in person. Recruitment was initiated through the delivery of letters. In cases, recruitment was based on the ‘snowballing’ effect of people talking to others and them getting in contact. We offered a £50 online shopping voucher to all participants.

The interviews were professionally transcribed and subsequently inductively coded by the research team. Although we went into the study with a sociological sensitivity for everyday practices, we did not categorise the data along specific conceptual lines, for example, Shove et al.’s (2012) elements of practice (materials, competencies, and meanings). We coded in a more open fashion, with an eye for recurrent themes, emerging from what interviewees said and therefore ‘whatever actual [. . .] practitioners recognize’ (Shove et al., 2012: 82) as practices of and to do with household recycling. This is how we ended up with our three-part analytical breakdown of disposal work and the themes we delve into below. Pseudonyms are applied to participant quotes.

Disposal work and the constitutive roles played by ‘packaging’, ‘cleanliness’, and ‘bins’

In this section, we discuss practices of waste identification, preparation, and segregation as part of unpacking everyday enactments of disposal work. We frame our discussion around the following three themes: packaging, cleanliness, and bins. Each theme has roots in other domains of labour. These roots extend beyond individual households, bringing into question the capacities of householders to improve plastics recycling.

Packaging – complicated identities

With the incremental introduction of segregated waste collections across the United Kingdom, it has become normal for WCAs to ask households to separate their recyclable packaging according to material type. Participants explained that this was easier is some instances than it was in others: ‘it’s dead easy with cardboard’ (Bob, research participant); ‘cans and glass: that’s easy because it’s cans and glass; paper’s alright’ (Wendy, research participant). Plastic packaging proved more problematic: ‘plastic is a ball ache’ (Angus, research participant). The issue derives, in part, from the design of plastic packaging and confounding visual, haptic, and auditory qualities. In combination, these act to complicate identification and in turn treatment and segregation.

Multi-material packaging proved an acute source of trouble. Plastic is commonly attached to, wrapped up with and around other materials, including tin, aluminium, and paper. People subsequently find themselves questioning what to do with packaging that can be reasonably classified as, at one and the same time, made up of many materials. Common examples include sandwich and cake packaging, disposable coffee cups, laminated paper bags, and juice cartons:

[. . .] when you buy, say orange juice, and it’s in a cardboard carton, but it’s got a plastic spout thing on it, and typically laminate as well – plastic lining. Like coffee cups, it’s made of cardboard, but it’s got plastic lining. But, so, putting that in the cardboard bin, which I don’t even know if you can, it’s cardboard but it’s got that liner, but I assume they can do something with that. Should we be cutting out the plastic? (Sally, research participant)

You know when you get a fancy pasta and it feels like it’s in a paper – the bag feels like paper but it clearly – if you feel inside, it’s kind of that smooth plastic feel to it. So, we were like kind of: is this paper? Is this plastic? And I think it was fairly obvious that it was a hybrid but because it was plastic, we included it, if that makes sense [. . .] If it’s got plastic in it, it can’t be recycled in the paper [. . .] Maybe it can be recycled plastic. (Christina, research participant)

Multi-material packaging types thus impose dilemmas. They can make it difficult to figure out which bin they should go in and can pose further challenges concerning how they should be treated (i.e. being cut up or not). Indeed, taken together, the two stated interview quotes illustrate the confusion caused by multi-material packaging, the different ways this is handled, and the extra disposal work some items require.

In cases, the confusion sees the emergence of unofficial ‘rules’, based on tactile, qualitative, and quantitative judgements of the packaging encountered. During the study, some employed a ‘mostly’ rule, others used a more stringent judgement – if it contains any plastic it goes in the trial bin. Others still explained that they would do what they could to deconstruct packaging based on how easy this was and the time at hand. Some talked of having the time to spend pulling packaging apart and/or cutting bits and pieces off. In other cases, time was more pressured, while the physical strength necessary to do the work of pulling apart or cutting packaging up was not always available.

The challenges noted are little to do with consumer choice and more about the ‘scripted’ (Akrich, 1992) design and effects of multi-material packaging. Regardless of what counts as good quality plastics recycling, be it putting only plastic bottles in (lids removed), or, as with the research trial, anything plastic in a separate bin, people encounter complicated multi-material packaging, which shapes their disposal work, what gets identified as recyclable, and how items are prepared and segregated.

Plastic packaging often also imitates other materials – looking, feeling, sounding, and behaving like something else. This also causes confusion and affects the disposal work of households and the quantity and quality of recyclables offered up. Crisp packets, for example, tend to look, feel, and sound ‘foilly’ (Rebecca, research participant). This leads to questions: ‘crisp packets [. . .] foil or plastic?’ (Jojo, research participant). Butter and coffee packaging pose similar puzzles: ‘My coffee, that’s foil, so they have gone in that bin [the general waste . . .]. Are they foil?’ (Oli, research participant). Likewise, plastic netting, typically used for fruit and vegetables, commonly imitates materials used to create fibres and threads, including cotton and hemp. During the research trial, this led to participants neglecting to put netting in the additional bin provided for all plastic packaging:

I eat a lot of oranges [. . .] so all this would go in the general bin. All this packaging [. . .] Now, thinking about it, it’s plastic, isn’t it? [. . .] I don’t know. Maybe the shape? The way it feels? (Antonia, research participant)

Yeah, I suppose it’s the touch, and I suppose it is what you see isn’t it? Because you see it and you just seem to automatically know that’s plastic, but netting doesn’t look like that does it? (Polly, research participant)

The imitative qualities of plastic packaging can therefore also act to complicate identification and the segregation of waste materials, helping to make contamination more likely. Crucially, householders use tactile and sensory skills, anchored in shared understandings of the properties of materials, to try to determine what tricky, imitative packaging is made of. This can involve going beyond simply looking at labels and logos for visual cues: touch and sound also influence practice. As such, contamination can occur thanks to different materials looking, sounding, and feeling like others and in so doing, steering the enactment of disposal work in directions contrary to those desired by WCAs, or indeed our attempts to collect all plastics in a single bin.

Cleanliness – preparing recyclables and ‘keeping house and home’

Cleaning recyclables proved a common feature of household disposal work. For many, it was part of making sure materials were kept in good fettle and recyclable – it was a process of valorisation. Fears of contaminating waste streams and rejected loads at materials recovery facilities (MRFs) prove influential:

We know that if it’s not properly washed, if there’s food particles stuck to it, then it’s rejected. And, I believe, they sometimes reject the entire batch, the entire bin! If there’s a food particle in the plastic, stuck on the plastic. So, yeah, we do make a point that it’s washed and cleaned before it’s put in the bin. (Rian, research participant)

Because they said on that programme, if there’s too much food waste it’s not worth recycling. And, I thought, yes, I don’t want to be the reason that whole bale gets chucked out. (Rebecca, research participant)

The conveyed shared forms of knowledge are not of an individual consumer or home. They are emergent of waste regimes and accompanying discourses of disposal and recovery. Going beyond ‘saving them a job’ (i.e. WCAs), as a research participant in Wheeler and Glucksmann’s (2015: 562) study of recycling outlined, the quotes from our research capture how wider held understandings of the implications of contamination in other domains of labour reach into homes. ‘The complex moral economy of recycling’ (Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015: 562) is thickened, in this instance, as an outcome of how expectations of cleanliness, rooted in organisational practices and sites of resource recovery, permeate the domestic sphere, shape the conduct of disposal work, and the materials produced.

In other instances, decisions concerning the washing of plastic packaging were explained as part of ‘keeping house and home’. They were embedded in notions of ‘purity and danger’ (Douglas, 1966: 36), and attempts to avoid nasty smells, vermin, and bacteria:

Antonia:

‘Bob, I know, rinses out meat. But I read that you shouldn’t rinse out meat packets’.

Bob:

‘Not chicken. I don’t do chicken [. . .] I just kind of read that if you wash out the chicken pack, the water can hit the juices and spray it into your kitchen [. . .] So I don’t do the chicken [. . .] If it’s kind of like, salmon or something, I’ll rinse it out because I don’t want my kitchen smelling of fish’. (Antonia and Bob, research participants)

Likewise, sour milk’s offending odours posed an issue: ‘[. . .] milk bottles – I definitely do leave the lids on [. . .] Milk goes off really quickly anyway, it stinks’ (Sam, Research participant). Both examples echo Douglas’ (1966: 36) assertion that ‘dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements’. Regarding the examples outlined, raw chicken carries with it fears of food poisoning, steering action away from cleaning packaging; salmon and milk are synonymous with undesirable smells, making rinsing appropriate and necessary. A systematic ordering and classification of goods and packaging thus takes place in homes, as sites of cleanliness, comfort, and safety. And this ordering affects how materials are prepared as part of disposal work.

The production of quality recyclables is a moot point here, with other concerns coming into view and affecting how people do the recycling. Regardless of requests to remove lids from plastic bottles, people may keep them on milk cartons to avoid the pong of remnants escaping. Irrespective of requests to rinse out packaging containing food, if the contents are perceived as a threat to keeping a healthy and hygienic home, this may not happen. WCA attempts to obtain higher value recyclables are thus caught up in lay normativities embedded in shared notions of cleanliness, which may or may not marry up with the organisation’s requirements and targets.

Bins and segregation – getting ‘creative’ (‘hiding stuff’)

Bins, while mundane, are political (Chappells and Shove, 1999; Hawkins, 2005; Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015). They carry with them rules and expectations of conduct (e.g. what goes in each bin; when they should go out; where they should be placed for collection). Their shape and size also influence disposal work. Influence is, in this instance, emergent of multiple practices and associated commitments combining and playing out through the related generation and sorting of waste, the physical capacities of bins, and the logics of collection they represent and are part of. Crucially, a heady convolution of commitments, capacities, and institutional logics can act to negatively affect recycling. We found problems accentuated in multi-occupant households, those with people regularly conducting paid work from home, and/or those with packaging-intensive hobbies, such as crafts. In households marked out by one or a mix of these features, bin space proved a premium, provoking a need to get ‘creative’ (Jojo, research participant) and ‘hide stuff’ (Charlie, research participant).

The need to get creative was explained in the following terms:

I put the stuff in that I know can go in on top. The grey [general waste] bin just isn’t big enough for non-recyclable stuff that comes into the household [. . .] You have to be a bit ‘creative’ [. . .] I probably do understand what should go in and what shouldn’t. It’s a point of where else do I put it? If I put it into the grey [bin], I’m not going to have enough room. (Jojo, research participant)

In effect, week-to-week forms of creativity amounted to putting plastic bottles on top of items (i.e. plastic flexibles, bags, pots, tubs, and trays) that are not currently collected in the research area for recycling in the dry recycling bin. Creativity was not an outcome of a lack of knowledge. Rather, the affordances of a 140-litre slimline general waste bin and collection rules clashed with the participant’s many commitments to paid employment and leisure practices, both of which largely took place at home. These included remote office working, doing their own car maintenance, upcycling furniture, making and selling bracelets, key rings, charms, and wooden crafts. Together, these commitments and accompanying practices added to the groundswell of plastic packaging in the home and the need to bend the rules and contaminate the recycling stream.

Accounts from family households of hiding plastic waste further evidence how a mix of everyday commitments, materials, and binning infrastructure and rules can negatively affect recycling:

I’m so conscious that we only have that smaller grey bin, and a lot of the space is taken up with nappies that [mean] we don’t have that much more extra space [. . .] [I] put stuff down the sides and hide it. (Charlie, research participant)

As captured, the pressures of family life register through material flows and the capacities of household bins, acting in consort to shape how recycling is carried out. Nappies and other baby-related items (i.e. drinks and food packaging), for example, take up a lot of space in the general waste bin. Subsequently, there is little room left for any other waste. Yet this waste still has to be dealt with and disposed of, hence the move to conceal it in the dry recycling bin.

Smaller general waste bins and a by-weekly collection schedule, techniques commonly used to nudge people towards recycling more, can thus intersect with various practices and obligations, helping to produce contamination, rather than deterring it. Indeed, the need to get ‘creative’ and ‘hide’ stuff were a compound outcome of a piling-up of multiple packaging-intensive practices that were not accommodated by collection infrastructure and protocols.

Concluding discussion – influences, implications, and opportunities

Plastic pollution is a pressing sociological and societal concern. Recycling has long formed a favoured response and there is now no getting away from the consequences of the disposal work conducted by householders for the recovery and recirculation of plastics in (and indeed beyond) England (Bulkeley and Gregson, 2009; Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2013). Contrary to commonplace thinking in research and policy, the labour undertaken is clearly not of householders own making. It involves a bundling of co-existing and co-located practices aimed at identifying, preparing, and segregating waste. Like all practices and bundles thereof, these ‘acquire something of a life of their own’ (Shove, 2022: 7). These lives are complicated because they involve an entanglement of skills, values, and materials with various roots, many of which reach out beyond the home. Attention is primed, in turn, to constitutive entanglements of practice and opportunities in influence bundled enactments. By developing this concluding discussion along these lines, we delve into issues of power and political economy – themes theories of practice and resultant research on consumption and sustainability have been said to pay limited attention to (Evans, 2020; Soron, 2019; Warde, 2022). We do this by continuing to privilege work, over consumption, and therefore paying attention to practices involved in the production of plastic resources.

Packaging design and manufacture are clearly influential domains of practice and labour that shape household disposal work. Both multi-materials and packaging with imitative qualities can act to increase the likelihood of contamination. Both issues suggest efforts aimed at design for recyclability are important (Wilson et al., 2022). Simplicity is key. Labelling alone cannot be relied on. An appreciation of the types of tactile judgements made, including touch, sound, and appearance, as part of identifying waste resources, are also important. Whether practices of packaging design and manufacture can be rejigged ‘at large’, with the aim of making identification further down the supply chain simpler, is no simple matter. Both are behemoth domains, made up of multiple practices, with complex histories, functions, and ends. Future research aimed at examining such details would help shore up the particulars and key points of tension.

Switching attention, it is clear that the ‘bin is a scripted object, with rules of binning behaviour inscribed in its shape, size and form’ (Chappells and Shove, 1999: 271). It is also clear that the script is not always read as intended and the outcomes not always those desired by WCAs. While the use of slimline 140-litre general waste bin is generally thought to encourage people to recycle more, we found instances where these receptacles pushed practices of segregation in the opposite direction, encouraging contamination. The challenges were more acute in larger, family households, and in those with people working from home. In effect, contamination transpires as different forms of labour unfolding within homes (i.e. to do with parenting, employment, and hobbies), interact with the working practices of WCAs and features of localised waste regimes, including the capacities of bins and collection schedules. While Metcalfe et al. (2012: 151) assert that ‘injecting some flexibility into the material agency of the bin [. . .] would be a way of allowing people some control over troublesome issues’, we see it as a way of accommodating practices, intersections thereof, and associated forms of accumulation. In practice, this could involve providing larger families, those with babies, and/or those working from home, bigger general waste bins or encouraging neighbours to share spare capacity. Such measures, all with their own trade-offs, could help avoid the need to get creative, hide stuff, and contaminate waste resources. Again though, questions over the practicalities involved in making such changes demand a more thorough examination of WCAs and collection work.

Our discussion of the relationships between cleanliness and recycling reveals another dimension of entanglements of labour that affect the disposal work conducted in households. Shared understandings of the value and the importance of keeping materials and places of work clean proved formative. In cases, these understandings related to an appreciation that practices and places beyond the home, including those caught up with WCAs and MRFs, value clean recyclables and that cleanliness boosted recyclability. In other instances, examples of cleaning were couched in attempts to keep homes – as multivariant sites of labour and production, including those to do with cooking, eating, sleeping, and caring for the self and others – sanitised and safe. Both cases are ‘soaked with moral, social and symbolic meaning’ (Shove, 2003: 80) – they are not individual and isolated precepts.

The shared normativities of domestic disposal work detailed may directly or indirectly reflect and align with the desires of local WCAs, MRFs, and what is counted as good-quality recycling. They may also confound such notions of quality, as with the example of milk bottles being rinsed and the lids being replaced and tightened to lock in offending odours (as noted, in the area we conducted research, the aim was to receive plastic bottles, lids removed). Thanks to the multiplicity of practices and intersecting normativities of cleanliness at play, speculating on opportunities for change is fraught with difficulty. While bins and packaging are by no means easy, isolated points of change, they are at least tangible, materialised points of entry, through which possibilities of change can be threaded. Shared and divergent meanings of practice do not afford the same treatment. One option is to explore opportunities to sequentially align working practices according to normative values and standards. As opposed to trying to change practices of disposal work and the shared meanings and values that shape them, waste collection and processing infrastructures could be designed around normative values and related enactments taking place in homes and the resources these help pump back into circulation. As with the other opportunities noted, more research is needed to think through what this would look like in practice and therefore, in particular, waste regime contexts.

Bringing this article to a conclusion, we have discussed the effects packaging, bins, and shared notions of cleanliness have with regard to disposal work and therefore practices of waste identification, preparation, and segregation, in relatively discrete terms. The effects, along with the causes, are in practice, entangled. Judgements of material type, size, design, and the contents of packaging, interact with bins, their physical capacity, embedded rules, collection schedules, and normative notions of cleanliness associated with sites in and beyond the home. This entanglement means changes are not isolated, neither in terms of practice, nor place. It is in accepting this that we suggest future research could drill down further than we have into the specificities of constitutive relationships between working practices, domains of labour, and what is produced. A sensitivity for the nuances of waste regime contexts remains key. Our findings are the product of a study based in England. Other contexts will carry different cultural, economic, and political nuances. Eliciting such details and their implications could involve focusing on organisational settings and working practices, several of these, or tracing materials as they travel through and are moulded in sites of work and practice. ‘The shortcomings of analyses that focus only on single practices and neglect the connections, alliances and conflicts between practices’ would be avoided by taking such routes (Hargreaves, 2011: 95). Along the way, other concerns at the heart of sociological enquiry, which cut across the gamut of social inequalities and have not been scrutinised in this article, could be attended to. These opportunities arise from this article’s conceptual positioning, which involves foregrounding work, over consumption, as a conceptual keystone of practice-oriented sustainability research. As we have shown, this provides one means of helping to grasp how practices and arrangements thereof configure capacities to act and therefore a way to attend to issues of power, influence, and responsibility (Watson, 2017).