How do you treat plastic waste in your home? Are you a good consumer? A good recycler or a wishcycler? And is recycling the first thing you see when you open the door to your house?

Professors Alex Skandalis and James Cronin bring their marketing and consumer culture expertise to the Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives project – and to the podcast – to analyse consumer behaviours around plastic. But are they just making up all of the language and concepts they mention?

From the Aztecs to the Dark Ages, the Victorians to the present day, we discover plastics have been around our culture for much longer than you might think and go far beyond drinks bottles and food containers.

Discover a shift from plastic as an environmental saviour to a major sustainability problem, from a luxury item to something almost invisible in its ubiquity, and how the material is intrinsic to our modern-day society.

See how the PPiPL team have looked at household behaviours – from their shopping habits to their plastic disposal routines – how actions around recycling at home and at work affect each other; and how individual choices and behaviours are shaped by many factors around you.

And we find out the answer to the key question about whether Ancient Egyptians used plastics to wrap their mummies.

Read more about consumer attitudes and behaviours towards plastics here: https://doc.your-brochure-online.co.uk/Lancaster-University_FiftyFourDegrees_Issue_21/18/

And read the PPiPL white paper on household recycling here: https://zenodo.org/records/10839795

Episode Transcript