Donating Stuff on an Online Marketplace: Material Sense in Citizens’ Creative Waste Management

Abstract

This article explores stuff donation on an online marketplace interpreting the reorganization of the household materials as citizens’ creative waste management. The data consist of donation announcements collected in spring 2022 from a Finnish consumer-to-consumer (C2C) product resale platform. The study identifies three narratives for donations within the contemporary online market economy: ‘Someone’s trash is another one’s treasure’, ‘Getting rid of abundance’, and ‘(Almost) too good to be donated’. Results illustrate how the donation announcements were used to add meaning and value to surplus materials through descriptions of past use and imagined ways to maintain, repair, or recycle, as well as to propose potential functions for stuff no longer necessary for the donors. As conceptual and theoretical contributions, the article further develops the term material sense applying it in the analysis of novel empirical data, deepening its’ connections to new materialism, and dissecting it with material donations. Overall, we aspire to enrich discussions of alternative forms of consumption and understanding of sustainable human-material interactions as future citizenship skills.