Many Happy Returns: Corpora of Public-Facing and Consumer-Generated Single-Use Plastics Discourse, 2016-2021

Many Happy Returns (MHR) is a multidisciplinary project funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), as part of UKRI’s Enabling Research competition in its Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge. MHR aims to encourage reusable plastic packaging systems as a means of reducing single-use plastic waste. The linguistics work package of MHR aims: (i) to understand how people think about plastic (re)use by examining their language; (ii) to assess how well public perceptions appear to align with public-facing information on reuse; and (iii) to inform best-practice recommendations for communication around plastic reuse. The project built a corpus of relevant language, analysed it using corpus software, and interpreted it in relation to a project ecosophy.