Refill at home for fast-moving consumer goods: Uncovering compliant and divergent consumer behaviour

Context and problem: Consumers of fast-moving consumer goods have become accustomed to a culture of con-venience and disposability, cultivating practices that are at odds with recycling, reusing, and reducing. Through the concept of refill, the fast-moving consumer goods industry is moving beyond the disposability and recy-clability of packaging and products to consider longer term, more durable reuse solutions. If practised as intended, reuse has the capacity to lower the intensity of materials used compared to disposal or recycling. However, research on actual reuse behaviour is sparse, and new work is necessary to explore how consumers handle material resources in reuse offerings. Method: In-depth interviews with 26 consumers were conducted where the behaviour chain method was used to elicit and map resource journeys for 48 refill at home cases. Results: Consumers of refill at home offerings were found to display both compliant behaviour and a range of divergent resource handling behaviours, which either increased or decreased the impact of reuse. The behaviours were structured in a framework consisting of six reuse resource handling behaviour types and 17 sub-types, which operate alone or in combination. Whilst consumers displayed many instances of compliant behaviour, overall divergent behaviours were more common, like using multiple reusable products for the same purpose or using single-use products in parallel. Interestingly, consumers of refill at home offerings with a service engaged in compliant behaviour in the majority of the instances. Consumers were found to employ divergent behaviours even at the end of life, often recycling non-recyclable reusable components and occasionally disposing of re-cyclables in residual waste. Conclusions: The resulting framework of resource handling behaviours provides a more nuanced understanding of reuse in practice than previously offered. The behaviour chain method was found to have the structural and analytical rigour to dissect difficult-to-predict and complex journeys.