by Sandra Young
In March 2022, the Concept Analytics Lab was awarded a grant from the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), run in partnership with the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP). The call this year was aimed at addressing the critical challenges of Covid-19 recovery and climate change in an integrated way. We partnered with Africa New Energies (ANE), with their visualisation expertise. The Mass Observation project (MO) provided us with the data for an opportunity to apply our linguistic and computational analysis techniques to a new dataset.
Mass Observation directives focus on specific themes and ask volunteers called observers to write narrative responses to a series of questions on those themes. Every response is stamped with detailed information of each contributor-observer. In this case we studied the 2021 Household Recycling directive. This blog highlights key findings of our report and how our findings could feed into improving recycling performance in the UK.
Figure 1 shows us that many objects, depending on context, can either be reused or recycled: packaging, containers, waste (usually collocated as food, garden, household), pot, paper, plastic, bag.
In Figure 2 we see the perceived use of containers of different types in the way that they solely collocate with reuse and not throw (tubs and pots being types of containers). Jar is used in the context of both recycle and throw. When we look at the collocates this seems to be because of the contradiction between keeping, then throwing out if no use is found for said jars.
Here are some examples of the use of jars in context:
Figures 1, 2 and 3 show us that packaging and plastic are important collocates for all three verbs (reuse, recycle and throw). When we look closer at the data we see this seems to be in relation to a number of issues: uncertainty, variation in services and multiplicity of packaging.
Here are some examples of the use of jars in context:
Coupled with uncertainty about plastics and other types of recycling, respondents expressed doubt as to what happens to recycling once it is taken away.
This is coupled with a desire to know more about what happens:
Despite this doubt and cynicism in the process, respondents showed their clear commitment to recycling as a process, accompanied with a feeling of duty.
The combination of lack of standardisation and information on the part of institutions such as the council, combined with this feeling of duty and responsibility as citizens on the part of the Mass Observation respondents, indicates that there might be a window of opportunity to intervene and improve recycling rates and quality through education and information sharing.
The findings in this report support research in other areas (Burgess et al (2021) and Zaharudin et al (2022) about the need for greater standardisation and reorganisation of recycling networks to maximise adherence to and performance of the recycling system. Our findings also suggest that another way to improve this would be the increase the information given to citizens about recycling processes, particularly in relation to what happens to recycling once it is collected.
Burgess, Martin, Helen Holmes, Maria Sharmina and Michael P. Shaver. (2021). The future of UK plastics recycling: One Bin to Rule Them All, Resources, Conservation and Recycling, January 2021, Vol. 164.
Zaharudin, Zati Aqmar, Andrew Brint, Andrea Genovese. (2022). Multi-period model for reorganising urban household waste recycling networks, Socio-economic planning sciences, July 2022.
We identify conceptual patterns and change in human thought through a combination of distant text reading and corpus linguistics techniques.
Identifying conceptual patterns and change in human thought through a combination of distant text reading and corpus linguistics techniques.
