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.