Observing the War on Waste – Henry Irving, Leeds Beckett University

This paper considers how connections can be made across Mass Observation’s 85 year history. It centres on a directive about household recycling sent to observers in Spring 2021.

The household recycling directive was inspired by work carried out by Mass Observation during the Second World War. Recycling – then referred to as ‘Salvage’ – was an important part of life on the home front. Colourful publicity campaigns encouraged people to do their bit for the war effort by carefully sorting waste, while emergency legislation introduced the risk of fines for those who failed to do so. Mass Observation were involved in both official and unofficial capacities. In summer 1941, for example, they sent out a government-sponsored directive about the impact of the publicity campaign. Despite losing their government contract, Mass Observation continued this work in 1942, carrying out an independent review of attitudes towards rules that made it a crime to throw away anything that could be recycled. Their findings illustrate a rapid change of opinions towards waste.

Waste remains a matter of global importance, tied to issues of over-consumption, environmental protection and irreversible climate change. There are also parallels between the British government’s current waste strategy and that which was adopted during the Second World War. The 2021 recycling directive was designed to show whether it is worth considering these in more detail. Its results illustrate the similarities and differences between different historical moments – and show how Mass Observation’s archive can inform current policy and practice. This paper will explain what was found.

Moralities of thrift in changing understandings of waste reduction and avoidance: A comparison of Mass Observers’ narratives three decades apart - Ulrike Ehgartner, University of York and Helen Holmes, University of Manchester

This paper explores shifting ideas of waste and recycling in narratives on thrift. Drawing on texts written by 33 individual respondents who answered two separate Mass Observation Directives on the subject of thrift in 1987 and 2016, it illuminates how waste reduction and avoidance is discussed in these narratives. It is found that what is considered as thrift is depended on the temporal context in which the narrative is set.

Two key findings are presented: Firstly, we illustrate how respondents explain motivations for such practices differently, depending on whether their examples relate to what they were exposed to during their upbringing or to their own practices at present. Between these two contexts, the moralisation of thrift through practices of waste reduction and avoidance shifts from a focus on financial hardship towards consciousness/satisfaction, which indicates that current understandings of thrift combine values of ethical consumerism and hedonism.

Secondly, responses to the 1987 and 2016 directives differ in terms of how thrift practices relating to disposable products and packaging materials are accounted for. Whilst in 1987 thrift was associated with efforts to find ways to use single-use multiple times, in the more recent narratives, thrift is associated with a firm commitment to household waste recycling through municipal services. This indicates that since the 1980s, municipal kerbside collections have led to a shift of norms in dealing with single-use products and recycling. The findings point towards critical considerations of how ‘care’ and ‘responsibility’ is employed in the context of material culture in the 21st century and the implications of this on environmental governance.

Mass Observing Waste and Recycling (online event)

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