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

This article reports on some of the research undertaken as part of the Many Happy Returns project at the University of Sheffield. This multidisciplinary collaboration brought together scientists, engineers, social scientists, and linguists with the aim to enable reusable packaging systems and reduce the need for single-use plastic. The Language team on Many Happy Returns built a corpus of over 4.5 million words of naturally occurring discourse about plastics and analysed this using corpus-linguistic methods. Our findings led us to make an initial suggestion that a conceptual frame of THE FAMILY plays a key role in the stories we tell about plastics in our everyday lives. This article is the first extended investigation of the Many Happy Returns corpus, combining our quantitative corpus-linguistic results with qualitative cognitive-linguistic analysis. It examines in depth how the FAMILY frame is employed by retailers and manufacturers. It also makes suggestions for potential ways in which the stylistic choices of large organisations could be reframed in order to make their communications with customers more effective and to encourage more pro-environmental behaviour.