Conventions, cleanliness and resource consumption in everyday life

Domestic cleaning practices have been steadily increasing for the last century, along with implicated water, energy and chemical use. Increasing resource consumption poses a challenge to sustainable development goals. This thesis explores the problems with increasing consumption in everyday life from three different vantage points: firstly a wide-brush is used to illustrate the changing patterns of household time use, compared with domestic water and energy consumption, and appliance ownership ocher time in two different cultures: Australia and Sweden. To fill in some of the detail a secondary study scrutinises advertising to see how cleanliness is presented in popular culture in the two focus countries. Finally in-depth interviews will be conducted in homes to further understand what motivates the everyday routines people construct, and how they change. This empirical data will be used to more fully interrogate collective conventions, and how they change.