Reuse practices and household consumption work

This paper explores practices of reuse – understood as an environmentally preferable alternative to single-use consumption – at the household level. Based on observations of everyday grocery consumption activities across both ‘alternative’ retail sites associated with the provisioning of reuse and more ‘mainstream’ outlets, we identify some specific practices – including decanting, stock management and recirculating – which we conceptualize as a form of ‘consumption work’. Our analysis suggests that household practices of reuse are more prevalent and more varied than might be assumed in existing policy and related commentary. We conclude that future transitions to reuse might depend less on establishing new practices, driven by narratives of green consumerism. Rather, we suggest, greater attention should be paid to wider changes, including the transformation of supply chains to align with and facilitate the range of ‘reuse work’ currently observed within everyday domestic spaces.

Received 7 May 2024
Accepted 23 July 2025

Consumption work; circular economy; package-free shopping; reuse; household practices

travail de consommation; économie circulaire; commerce sans emballage; réutilisation; pratiques ménagères

Trabajo de consumo; economía circular; compras sin envases; reutilización; prácticas domésticas

Cet article explore les pratiques de réutilisation – comprise comme une meilleure option durable par rapport à la consommation à usage unique – au niveau du foyer. Sur la base des observations des activités quotidiennes de consommation des courses à travers les sites de distribution ‘alternative’ associés avec la disposition de réutilisation, et des lieux de ventes plus ‘traditionnels’, nous identifions quelques pratiques spécifiques dont notamment le transvasement, la gestion des stocks et la recirculation, que nous conceptualisons comme une forme de ‘travail de consommation’. Notre analyse suggère que les pratiques ménagères de réutilisation sont plus répandues et plus variées que ce à quoi l’on pourrait s’attendre par rapport aux politiques existantes et aux commentaires reliés. Nous concluons que les futures transitions vers la réutilisation pourrait dépendre moins de l’établissement de

CONTACT Rorie Beswick-Parsons r.parsons@sheffield.ac.uk School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield S3 7ND, UK.

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

nouvelles pratiques, conduites par le discours du consumérisme vert. Plutôt, nous affirmons que plus d'attention devrait être portée aux changements structurels, y compris la transformation des chaînes d'approvisionnement pour suivre et faciliter le 'travail de consommation' actuellement observé quotidiennement dans les espaces domestiques.

With a growing emphasis on the 'Circular Economy' in debates on consumption, sustainability and everyday life, systems of reuse are increasingly attracting attention (for example (EMF, 2019), (Greenpeace, 2020)) in transforming 'production-consumption systems towards enhanced material circularity' (Greene et al., 2024, p. 1). For example, the UK Plastics Pact emphasizes the need for a series of technical and design-based solutions in 'eliminating problematic plastics' and 'creating a circular economy for plastics' (WRAP, n.d.). At the same time, there is a strong emphasis on 'hard hitting campaigns' that encourage citizens to 'recycle more of the right things' (WRAP, n.d.) and a widespread sense that consumers must 'do their bit' by, for example, switching from single-use plastics to reusable packaging.¹ Within social science work, the role of 'consumer-users' and the labour involved in achieving a more sustainable circular economy has been identified as a critical, but often overlooked, component of citizen participation (Greene et al., 2024; Hobson, 2020; Hobson et al., 2021). Hobson's work suggests that any successful transition towards a circular economy requires a shift beyond prevailing individualistic perspectives on consumer behaviour that have dominated policy approaches against the backdrop of technocratic changes (cf. Shove, 2010). This paper contributes to these debates, focusing on the dynamics of existing household consumption practices to better understand how these might enable or inhibit the development of systems of reuse.

To do so, we draw on the geographies of household sustainability and proceed from the assumption that the home, or household, is a site of interest in which 'expected, normal, mundane and ordinary' practices are often overlooked and in the background of policy (Waitt & Phillips, 2016, p. 361). This body of work brings together material geographies and cultural environmental research to explore inter alia the relationships involved in making 'the home' (Gibson et al., 2013); the connections between 'the household' and wider networks (Gibson et al., 2011); the trajectories of material objects through the home (Evans, 2018; Farbotko & Head, 2013); and the household tensions that may inhibit transitions to more sustainable practices (Head et al., 2013, 2016). Most notably, this work emphasizes that mundane everyday activities are labour intensive. For example, Collins and Stanes (2023) demonstrate how the practice of 'storage' requires remembering, planning, sorting, storing, unpacking, and reappraising. They also demonstrate that this involves iterative processes of ordering in choreographing connections of care with which to achieve household sustainability. Extending these perspectives to the neglected aspects of reuse, we refer to consumption practices that engage with internal household relationships of coupling, care, support, and economic exchange (cf. Collins & Stanes, 2023; Mylan et al., 2016; Organo et al., 2013; Waitt et al., 2012).

Our analysis draws on Wheeler and Glucksmann's analysis of 'consumption work', which refers to the range of tasks required of consumers, before or after they consume, on which consumption itself is predicated (Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015a). Few goods or services are ever delivered 'complete' to individuals ready for consumption, with most requiring some form of activity on the part of consumers. For example, tasks such as building flat-pack furniture or installing software on a home computer illustrate forms of – often non-negotiable – labour required to complete and complement a variety of everyday consumption practices (Hobson et al., 2021). Our interest here is in the labour required to successfully perform practices of reuse, with respect to grocery shopping.

We advance our account of reuse through reference to an empirical study of people's engagement with plastics and other packaging materials. Given our theoretical orientation towards practice, we pay close attention to the 'doings and sayings' involved in people's consumption work (Schatzki, 1996). Where existing policy and commentary focuses narrowly on the (slow) uptake of reusable packaging,² we identify a range of everyday practices – such as decanting items before and after shopping, managing stock levels in the kitchen, and recirculating (identifying objects, washing up, storing, and constructing shopping lists) – and how these facilitate reuse. Further, we extend existing accounts of package-free shopping (for example, Fuentes et al., 2019) by studying not just households who shop at 'alternative' retail sites but also those who shop at more 'mainstream' outlets. Taken together, we suggest that household practices of reuse are more prevalent than might be assumed in existing policy approaches. We conclude by considering the wider contextual factors that would help to intensify and normalize these 'already existing' practices of reuse at scale.

Our analysis is informed by the concept of 'consumption work' (Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015b) which builds on the 'total social organisation labour' approach developed by Glucksmann (1995, 2000, 2005). Wheeler and Glucksmann conceptualize consumption work as resting on a broader, multidimensional concept of 'socio-economic formations of labour' involving three dimensions of labour: technical – the division and allocation of labour in the form of tasks and skills to different kinds of people; modal – interdependencies of work across different socio-economic bases; and processual – connections of labour across the whole span of a process of production of goods or provision (Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015b, pp. 35–36). The work consumers undertake conveys and depends on 'how goods and services are sold, how "complete" they are and on their potential uses' (Glucksmann, 2016, p. 881). It is important to note that not all work within the home constitutes consumption work, with some forms of 'domestic labour' being preoccupied with the reproduction of the home (Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015b). The aim here is not to provide a categorical definition in separating the two – indeed, activities may be interpreted as both consumption work and domestic labour – but to highlight that the consumption work framework enables us to consider the division of labour and shifting boundaries of work undertaken across different socio-economic contexts. Examples of technological innovations that save labour in the retail sector, such as self-service shopping, automated checkouts, and hand-held scanners, also rely on additional labour from shoppers (Bulmer et al., 2018; Dujarier, 2016; Kjellberg et al., 2019), whilst the use of ready meals and other forms of convenience food are examples of

labour from unpaid domestic work transferring to paid work in food factories and retail outlets (Glucksmann, 2005, 2016; Jackson et al., 2018; Warde, 1999).

Within the context of household waste management practices, economies of consumer recycling remain a predominant focus in household work. Through a variety of recycling tasks and activities including cleaning, squashing, disassembling, sorting, storing, and transporting items, Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015a) highlight the interdependencies of such work within the home, with work tasks conducted by other waste management actors/technologies (see also Chappells & Shove, 1999; Middha & Horne, 2024). Seldom recognized as 'work', but rather portrayed as 'a conscious green act' (Oates & McDonald, 2006, p. 421), recycling activities are often enacted through a moral economy of resource stewardship and environmental citizenship. They are also, however, embedded within relations of familial care, conventions of household order in keeping one's house tidy, norms of cleanliness and hygiene, and conveniences more generally (Pedersen & Manhece, 2020; Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015b). Contributions such as Lindsay and colleagues on consumption work in low waste households, not only emphasize debates about sustainability and transition to a circular economy failing to recognize the amount of additional labour often required, but also the gender disparity in enacting this (Lindsay et al., 2024). They draw to attention the inclusion of 'sustainability labour' as part of existing household dynamics and gendered practices (see also Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015a), in attempts to reduce plastic consumption involving new and additional modes of shopping and relying on other domestic activities, such as meal planning. These ideas build on earlier work by Organo, Head and Waitt, who found that women spent more time on sustainable practices than men and did so more often (Organo et al., 2013). Referring to waste management in apartment living, Horne et al. (2022) refer to the temporalities and rhythms of plastic waste being intensified due to space requirements, or lack thereof, with practices of sorting, recycling, and disposing of plastic waste important in maintaining household hygiene, convenience, and emotions of living in apartment spaces.

Recent literature on the development of package-free shopping, of which systems of reuse are a part (e.g. Beitzen-Heineke et al., 2017; De Temmerman et al., 2023; Fuentes et al., 2019; Kemper et al., 2024; Louis et al., 2021; Rapp et al., 2017), has focused principally on the retail-consumption interface, highlighting the material rearrangement of stores and the competencies that consumers must develop to successfully negotiate this new mode of shopping (Fuentes et al., 2019).

It is often argued that practices of reuse are less convenient and more demanding for consumers (Zeiss, 2018), requiring more planning and consideration of which bags, jars and other receptacles are needed (Fuentes et al., 2019). Accepting that consumption is a process that reaches far beyond the act of shopping, it may also require additional effort in preparing food items when back at home (Kemper et al., 2024); having to rethink or expand storage spaces to accommodate multiple containers (WRAP, 2022); and needing to clean containers thoroughly to avoid potential food safety risks in store (Beitzen-Heineke et al., 2017). Yet despite the acknowledgement of these actions, there has been limited research on exploring these activities, unpacking their role, and understanding their potential significance in facilitating circular economy transformations. As such, we extend these perspectives by looking beyond 'shopping' – and the attendant focus on reusable packaging – to explore a range of other domestic practices associated with practices of reuse. In this, our research contributes to the research agenda proposed by Hobson et al. (2021), addressing the questions of who

undertakes consumption work, to what ends, and how its multiple forms are coordinated within the household.

This paper explores the diversity of practices associated with reuse at the household level. Rather than focusing only on those who are committed to package-free shopping, we also include those with less, or no, experience of reuse, in order to understand domestic labour activities which may align with existing practices of reuse – including those that may not be captured by dominant policy framings. In exploring how reuse work is practically accomplished by participants, our fieldwork attended to a range of tasks and activities prior, during, and after the acquisition of items/products. In doing so, we explored the presence of ‘reuse work’ already embedded in everyday life and, consequently, the similarities of both ‘formal’ performances of reuse – when engaging with official systems of reuse – and ‘informal’ performances of domestic labour – which may escape the gaze of environmental policy.

We adopted a qualitative approach to our study, with participants recruited via social media (targeting sustainability groups and local community groups), in-store posters at an independent refill store, and convenience sampling. An initial survey captured participants’ shopping behaviours related to recycling and reuse, with an opt-in for further engagement. Of 70 survey respondents, 39 expressed an interest, and 14 agreed to further engagement in the research. Table 1 provides details of participant recruitment method, location, and reuse experience. Of these, 8 regularly shop at a local refill store; 2 have tried a refill store recently or in the recent past; and 4 have not shopped at a refill store before. It would be disingenuous to suggest that participants can be easily categorized as ‘reuse shoppers’ or ‘single-use shoppers’. For example, participants who are committed to shopping at refill stores also supplemented their shopping for everyday goods (e.g. food, personal care, and home care goods) with trips to other retail spaces such as supermarkets (see Kemper et al., 2024), mixing and matching their shopping practices depending on the facilities available to them at the time.

To understand the true scale of reuse within the UK is complex to say the least, with reliable tools to measure the scale of reuse only recently formalized (see EMF, 2024).

Systems of reuse are often differentiated in terms of packaging 'ownership' between user sourced and owned containers (reuse-refill) and brand/retailer owned (reuse-return) provisioning methods (EMF, 2019). From a system of provisions and everyday material arrangements context (see Greene et al., 2024), access to reuse in the UK is primarily facilitated through a network of independent retail institutions – often referred to as zero-waste, refill, or unpackaged stores – or part of a store that also sells health related and ethically sourced products (reuse-refill). With respect to more mainstream provisioning practices, retailers have tentatively engaged at a limited scale. Several retailers have trialled 'reuse zones' (see Tesco, 2022; WRAP, 2022), while online retailers have also engaged with reuse-return options across a selection of goods (see Abel & Cole, 2025; GoUnpackaged, 2024). Yet, these trials have often ended due to 'operational and commercial issues and current consumer barriers' (Conway, 2024). More broadly, there are also notable examples of reuse-refill branded products (for example, homeware goods), some of which may arguably fall short of recent design standards for reuse (see EMF, 2024).

Our methodology was informed by previous studies of household consumption, sustainability, and the performance of practices³ (see Beitzen-Heineke et al., 2017; Evans, 2014; Kemper et al., 2024; Martens, 2012). In addition to semi-structured interviews and diary activities, we sought to 'thicken' these 'talk-based' methods through activities such as kitchen tours and object-centred interviewing. Further, we adopted a range of observational techniques such as accompanying participants on food shopping trips (both reuse and conventional), travelling to and from the shop; unpacking shopping; writing shopping lists; completing a 'Click and Collect' shop online; washing-up; and refilling containers. These methods enabled us to capture the combination of observation and talk, surfacing the potentially taken for granted aspects of reuse as they unfolded. Although this paper does not claim universality or generalizability of our findings, moving beyond the limits of self-reported behaviour to uncover unassumed reuse practices highlights the potential underestimation of existing behaviours essential to advancing a circular economy.

The fieldwork was conducted between November 2021 and July 2022. Engagement with participants involved an initial meeting either over the phone or briefly in person to talk through the research project, answer any queries, confirm participation and (written) consent, and organize the next steps. Across the 14 households, ten households engaged three times; and four engaged twice. Each encounter ranged from 45 min to three and a half hours. Seven households completed a supplementary diary activity. Seven concluding interviews were conducted face-to-face, in the participants' homes, whilst two were conducted online. This concluding discussion utilized a mix of standardized pre-determined open-ended questions, as well as several follow-up questions that arose from the previous encounters and/or the diary activity. This offered an opportunity to reflect on their participation and explain in further detail any points that were raised in previous encounters. Each household received a £50 gift voucher upon completion.

The material was analysed using NVivo software, with coding tasks guided by the research's main aims of identifying other required consumption work activities associated with practices of reuse at the household level, and to consider who undertakes this work, to what ends, and how its multiple forms are coordinated within the household. In doing so, the analysis of the material was informed more generally by a social practice approach, with respect to identifying materials, competencies, and meanings (Shove et al., 2012)

associated with practices of reuse. The data analysis also identified other practices and engagements with enacting sustainability within the household's everyday life – including recycling, researching whether to purchase alternative forms of energy (solar panels and ground source heat pumps), gardening, and composting. Though not discussed here, we acknowledge the breadth and inter-connection of sustainable consumption practices enacted throughout the home.

The following presentation of the empirical findings from our fieldwork is divided into three sections, starting with an analysis of decanting practices before moving on to a discussion of stock management and recirculating. Although these practices are described in separate sections, the analysis shows the interconnections between them, whilst also conveying the replication and reconfiguration of existing everyday routines, the significance of which is highlighted in the conclusion.

As has been conceptualized in detail elsewhere (see Fuentes et al., 2019), reusable packaging systems require the reconfiguration and subsequent reinvention of shopping practices. With the removal of packaging and the requirement of engaging in the practice of refilling in store, Fuentes et al. refer to the reframing of shopping, the re-skilling of consumers, and the re-materialization of the store. However, in what follows, we present a series of activities and tasks that are required so that practices of reuse can be situated within everyday life. In referencing more mainstream shopping practices and household contexts, we argue that this form of consumption work is not novel, but rather constitutes a formalization of pre-existing domestic labour undertaken by consumers to enable systems of reuse.

Based on our empirical work with 14 UK households, we have identified specific practices associated with household-level reuse, in the form of decanting, managing stock, and recirculating that facilitate participation in systems of reuse. Our analysis of these makes

four main contributions: proving a case for nuanced reading of materiality and plastics; expanding understandings of what constitutes reuse at the household level; providing evidence of the domestic division of labour in terms who carries out specific reuse practices; and highlighting the nature of the 'consumption work' involved in carrying out domestic practices of reuse. We deal with each of these in turn.

First, we have drawn attention to the range of materials – plastic and otherwise – that are embedded in practices of reuse. We have shown that the appropriation of different containers for the purposes of decanting, managing excess stock, and recirculating is shaped by functional and aesthetic concerns. Crucially, we have highlighted that some plastics, specifically, polypropylene are particularly prevalent. This lends support to the idea that the blanket condemnation of plastics should be avoided in context of efforts to address the specific challenges associated with 'single use' plastics. Adopting a material geographies approach serves as a reminder that not all plastics are equal (see Evans et al., 2020).

Second, whilst existing accounts of package-free shopping have focused principally on the retail-consumption interface, we have explored a range of other domestic practices associated with reuse. In doing so, we join recent geographical debates surrounding household sustainability, everyday consumption, and the material culture of the home to enhance our understanding of the household consumption practices that are involved in enacting the circular economy. These practices are often invisible both to those who carry them out and to environmental policymakers – precisely because they may not be considered as 'reuse' in the formal, narrow, sense of shopping at refill stores using 'reusable' containers. We also draw attention to the additional domestic labour (stock management) associated with shopping at refill stores, which reflects more commonly observed limitations in negotiating the rhythm of shopping and household consumption routines. While practices, such as refilling, are more-or-less specific to dedicated systems of reuse (e.g. refill in store), we highlight those practices of decanting, stock management, and recirculating can also be observed in relation to conventional supermarket-based consumption and related domestic labour routines. It follows that such practices, commonly observed within the private domain of the home, serve as an integral part of the successful functioning of macro-economic systems (Hobson et al., 2021). The association between reuse practices and broader domestic labour activities suggests that concerns amongst policy makers and commentators about the 'slow uptake' of reusable packaging may be overstated and premised on the potential underestimation of existing behaviours essential to advancing a circular economy. Accepting that not all informal labour is 'exploitative' (Hobson et al., 2021), we suggest that opportunities for transitioning to a more circular economy might be found within existing configurations of consumption and economy as well as in the reconfiguration of shopping practices (cf. Fuentes et al., 2019).

Third, we attend to Hobson et al. (2021) questioning of who undertakes consumption work, to what ends, and how its multiple forms are coordinated within the household. In contrast to the stark gender disparities observed in previous research on household sustainability practices (Lindsay et al., 2024; Organo et al., 2013; Waitt et al., 2012), our work points to a more nuanced gender division of labour with 'reuse work' being undertaken by both men and women. We acknowledge that activities of decanting, stock management and recirculating connect to

existing gendered divisions of labour within the home and are generally conducted and managed by a particular individual. Therefore, we suggest that future research should consider these labour dynamics further in order to understand how practices of reuse are negotiated within the household, particularly in relation to gendered dynamics of care (Lindsay et al., 2024; Liu et al., 2019). Our observations also suggest that people engage in consumption work, and more broadly domestic labour, for aesthetic reasons as well as for functional benefits, for example practising object stewardship to prolong the social life of things. These differing engagements warrant further attention.

Finally, conceptualizing these activities and tasks as 'consumption work' helps to understand the work that consumers are required to engage in as part of the transition to more circular forms of consumption. For example, the requirement on consumers to bring their own containers to reuse-refill stores results in several processual forms of labour, primarily that of decanting and recirculating. Whilst these activities may be interpreted as domestic labour due to them being household-based, we argue that they play a key role in the wider circuits of the reuse economy, extending well beyond the home. Allied to this, our sensitivity to how labour is distributed along the supply chain (Hobson et al., 2021) allows us to offer a rejoinder to the dominant framing of the role of 'consumers' in the circular economy. In contrast to the prevailing idea that the onus is on consumers to take up and 'accept' new business models and products, our work suggests that more emphasis should be placed on the retail sector to adapt to consumers' existing practices. Differentiating between reuse-refill and reuse-return methods of provisioning (EMF, 2019), raises questions about the nature and amount of consumption work and domestic labour involved in these different systems (Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2015b). Future studies could usefully turn their attention to this complexity and nuance. Our approach also raises questions about who (state, market, or household) is required to do what work to ensure the success of reuse systems. As things stand, most of the work falls to individuals who are required to source, prepare, and maintain objects (recirculate) in refill systems, integrating these practices into their existing domestic routines. With a growing interest in transitioning towards a shared packaging economy (reuse-return), it is imperative to think about how best to recognize and formalize the work carried out by households whilst also questioning how responsibility and care should be reconfigured and formalized across the wider supply-chain.

We would like to thank our participants for their time and engaging in the research. The 'Many Happy Returns: enabling reusable packaging systems' project was supported by the UK's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) under grant NE/V010638/1. Writing and analysis was also supported by a Leverhulme Trust project, under grant ECF-2022-022.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [ECF-2022-022]; Natural Environment Research Council [NE/V010638/1].

Rorie Beswick-Parsons: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition. David M. Evans: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition. Peter Jackson: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition.

Ethical approval was received from the University of Sheffield (approval number: 039897).