Every little “help”: understanding the family frame in the discourse of plastic packaging

The multidisciplinary Many Happy Returns project aimed to enable reusable packaging systems and reduce single-use plastic. The Language team built a corpus of over 4.5 million words of discourse about plastics, analysed this using corpus-linguistic methods, and made an initial suggestion that a conceptual frame of the family plays a key role in the stories we tell about plastics. This article extends this investigation, combining corpus-linguistics with cognitive-linguistics to conduct a case study of the language of UK retail market leader, Tesco. It examines how the family frame is employed within the grocery sector, which accounts for over 900,000 tonnes of plastic packaging nationally each year. Pairing linguistic findings with the concept of “consumption work” documented by the project’s human geographers, the article highlights tensions between corporate narrative and domestic reality. It also suggests how large organisations could be reframe their language to restore consumer agency and encourage pro-environmental behaviour.