The Many Lives of Cardboard

‘The Many Lives of Cardboard’ will establish a new multi-disciplinary network to investigate a versatile material that is essential to contemporary culture, yet often overlooked. Cardboard is a ubiquitous symptom of everyday consumption and the global movement of stuff under late capitalism. As packaging, it is transient and disposable; yet it is also economically valuable, dubbed ‘beige gold’ after pandemic-related shortages. Cardboard takes humans from cradle to grave: since 2017 a government-sponsored cardboard ‘baby box’ has been offered to every newborn in Scotland, providing a safe place to sleep, while there is a growing market for cardboard coffins. It is promoted as a ‘sustainable’ alternative to plastics, yet the environmental impacts of its production and recycling are considerable. It holds conflicting cultural meanings, from temporariness and permanence, to preservation and decay. The varied life cycles of cardboard signal wider issues of contemporary environmental culture, politics and practice.

This project is a scoping exercise to identify areas for future arts, humanities and GLAM research, collaboration and network development. It will create a network for exploratory research, linking three institutions from London to Orkney (The National Archives (TNA); University of Edinburgh (UoE); University of Highlands & Islands (UH&I)). This new collaboration will unite histories of cardboard documented in the records of the state at TNA with people, collections, and institutions in Scotland, a key site in the history of paper and cardboard production in the British Isles.

Exploring the local lives of this global material within the UK, this cross-border project extends recent trends in environmental humanities, especially sustainability and circular economies, waste and discard studies, and histories of resource extraction, to develop an exemplar of collaborative experimental research practice. Co-led by three ECRs with complementary expertise in histories of waste, the project will interrogate the pasts, presents and futures of cardboard at a time of environmental crisis, and when questions around archives and physical preservation are of continuing importance, despite increasing digitisation. In this foundational phase for the network, the aims and objectives are to:

- Interrogate the potential of the archive and heritage collections for understanding the histories and futures of cardboard;
- Investigate the diverse roles of cardboard in creative and sustainable cultures and economies;
- Assess how the many lives of cardboard offer a model for approaching material histories more broadly, through arts and humanities and cultural heritage research.

These will be achieved through a series of practical workshops and field trips to key sites in the life cycles and uses of cardboard: historic records and collections, manufacturing and waste management, and artists’ studios. A final symposium will bring together participants from academia, cultural heritage research and practice, industry, and the sustainability sector, to conclude the initial information-gathering and knowledge exchange stage, and plan the next phases of the network’s development.

This multi-disciplinary investigation of the history, culture, and materiality of a substance that is so often hidden in plain sight promises new avenues of research, collaboration, and practice within and beyond the GLAM sector, and arts and humanities disciplines.

AHRC Curiosity Award