Full of good intentions

May 28

We're sorting, saving and stockpiling like never before. So who's designing for the way we actually live now?

Doing the right thing takes up space

Tinned mackerel, hand-crank radios and bags for poo. That's the headline of a recent Guardian piece rounding up crisis prepping guides from around the world - and it's a pretty good summary of what governments are now asking us to keep at home.

The UK has now joined in, telling us to keep three days' worth of food at home. As the Guardian points out, this kind of advice used to be the preserve of preppers. Now it's mainstream, as climate breakdown makes weather more extreme and cyber attacks and sabotage become more common. And unlike Finland, which has grain reserves designed to feed its population for nine months, the UK has no national food stockpile to fall back on. Our buffer is our kitchen cupboards.

Which is all very sensible. But I have one small question…

“Where exactly are we meant to put it?”

Because if your home is anything like mine, the cupboards are already full. Not of junk, but of good intentions. The bag of clothes for the charity shop, the crisp packets waiting for the supermarket bin, the blister packs for the pharmacy, the Amazon boxes you can't quite bring yourself to recycle because they're such good boxes.

We've been told for years to stop throwing things away. And it turns out we've listened! We're not hoarders in the TV-documentary sense. We're responsible hoarders - and our homes weren't designed for it.

Our homes have become holding pens

Long before anyone mentioned stockpiling, we'd quietly turned our homes into sorting depots. Stuff doesn't leave anymore - it waits. For the right bin, the right shop, the right weekend, the right person to collect it.

Have a look round your own place. I bet you've got at least a few of these on the go:

Clothes and textiles in a bag by the door for the charity shop, or saved for fabric and craft projects

Soft plastics - crisp packets, bread bags, film - stuffed into a carrier bag for the supermarket drop-off

Blister packs waiting for the one pharmacy in town that takes them

Boxes, bubble wrap and padded envelopes kept for the next eBay or Vinted parcel

Carrier bags inside carrier bags (we all have one)

Jars, bottles and tubs for refills, leftovers or "something"

Eggshells and coffee grounds for the garden

Old phones, cables and gadgets that might be worth something, or need taking to the tip

Things to be fixed - the lamp for the repair cafe, the shoes for the cobbler, the hoover for the refurb service

The numbers back this up. DS Smith found 44% of us hoard cardboard boxes, with 135 million estimated to be sitting in UK sheds, garages and wardrobes. Material Focus estimates 880 million unused electrical items in UK homes - around 30 per household, up from 20 four years earlier.

And it's not just stuff we're sitting on. It's stuff we're processing. Rinsing, flattening, sorting, bagging, remembering to put it in the car. It's a whole new layer of domestic admin that nobody really talks about.

Katherine Mengardon, an ADHD coach with nine cats, has the perfect example. Cat food sachets are recyclable, just not at the kerb. So every day it's rinse them, find somewhere to put them, remember what you're doing with them and eventually take them somewhere that accepts them. She had a box just for the job. It didn't last. (Neither did the recycling bags, once the local foxes caught a whiff of cat food juice.)

With the circular economy growing - more take-back schemes, more refurb and repair, more resale - that layer is only going to get thicker. Every good circular idea has a small, unglamorous step in the middle where the thing sits in someone's hallway.

“It's a whole new layer of domestic admin that nobody really talks about.”

Now add a three-day stockpile

On top of all that, we're now being asked to prepare. The government announced its household resilience campaign in July, covering everything from severe weather and long power cuts to cyber attacks.

And people are worried. The Cabinet Office's own 2026 preparedness survey of nearly 11,000 UK adults found:

68% think emergencies will increase over the next 10 years
42% think food supply disruption bad enough to cause empty shelves is likely in their area within two years
Only 13% feel their household is largely or totally prepared
82% have less than a day's bottled water, based on 3 litres per person

Other countries are asking for a lot more. Sweden and Norway want households to manage on their own for at least a week. Denmark even publishes a sample three-day menu, right down to 300g of tinned mackerel. The US suggests keeping supplies at home, at work and in the car, and reviewing your kit every year. That's a lot of storage, and a lot of rotation.

The gap between advice and reality isn't just a UK thing either. A YouGov poll found almost half of Germans don't have even three days of supplies. And tellingly, Finland's guidance explicitly warns people against hoarding. Governments want us prepared, but not too prepared - which says a lot about how fine the line is between responsible and excessive.

So there's a big gap between what we're being asked to keep and what we actually have. When asked what stops them preparing more, 29% said money, 25% said they didn't want things to go out of date and get thrown away,

“18% said they simply didn't have the space”

I suspect that 18% is an underestimate. The survey is online and, by its own admission, struggled to reach some groups. And space only becomes a barrier once you start trying to store things. If the campaign works and more of us start stocking up, I'd bet that number goes up, not down.

Notice too that the second biggest barrier is about waste. People don't want to buy things they'll end up binning. That's the same responsible instinct that fills our cupboards with jars and boxes - and it's a storage and rotation problem as much as a money one.

So what does this mean for our homes?

For the last decade the dream home has been a calm, clear, Marie Kondo kind of place. Empty surfaces, hidden storage, a few things that spark joy.

But the responsible home is the opposite. It's full of things in transit. Arguably we're becoming anti-minimalists - not because we love stuff, but because throwing it away now feels wrong.

That creates some real tensions:

Space. Most UK homes, and especially flats, weren't built with a sorting depot in mind. Where does the soft plastics bag live when you don't have a utility room, a garage or a shed?

Visibility. If you hide it, you forget it. If you leave it out, it's clutter. The bag for the charity shop that's been in the boot since June is a very common story.

Rotation. A three-day stockpile only works if you eat the tins before they go out of date and replace them - which means knowing what you've got.

Guilt and stress. Clutter isn't just a practical issue, it's an emotional one. And our good intentions can end up making us feel worse about our homes, not better.

This is especially true for people with ADHD, where organisation, clutter and follow-through are often a daily struggle. NHS England estimates around 2.5 million people in England may have ADHD, including those without a diagnosis, and the number of adults prescribed ADHD medication rose by about a quarter in 2024/25. That's a lot of households where "just pop it in the right bag and take it to the right place" is a bigger ask than it sounds.

When I asked Katherine what she made of all this, she wrote a brilliant piece in response. Her take is that people with ADHD don't lack attention, they have too much of it. The struggle is filtering. So every small "do the right thing" task - which shop takes batteries, how long can you keep them before they leak, does this sachet need rinsing? - opens up a whole new set of questions. She calls these open loops: little unresolved problems that keep coming back for attention, each carrying a bit of guilt. As she puts it, a new responsibility "doesn't arrive in an empty brain".

Storage design matters hugely here. If something is tucked away in a closed cupboard, it can simply cease to exist. When Katherine rebuilt her house, she designed the kitchen around pull-out drawers and open shelves so everything is visible - she says it looks rather like a shop. And stockpiling cuts both ways. For some people with ADHD it's catnip: a finite problem, a spreadsheet, the perfect number of tins. For others, or the same person on a different day, it's one more overwhelming demand that never gets started.

I think we've designed the circular economy for an imaginary super-organised citizen with a big hallway and a car. Most of us aren't that person - and our homes are paying the price.

“a new responsibility doesn't arrive in an empty brain.”

Katherine Mengardon, ADHD Coach

So what are brands doing about it?

I see this from two sides.

In my business, Ready Or Not, I work with brands to develop products, services, brands and comms that are closer to what people actually need.

As chair of Climate Action Lewisham, I help lead household preparedness workshops, where people bring very real, very practical questions. Not "should I care about climate change?" but "where do I keep five days of water in a one-bed flat?" So I can't help asking - who's designing for this?

There's huge opportunity here for household, storage and homeware brands. What if storage was designed for things on their way out of the home, not just things we're keeping? What if a recycling station looked good enough to live in the kitchen rather than hiding under the sink? What if your stockpile told you what needed eating next?

And it's not only storage brands. Retailers running take-back schemes, packaging brands, charities, resale platforms and repair services all rely on that unglamorous middle step happening in someone's home. If it's a pain, it doesn't happen.

Katherine makes a sharper point too, and it's one brands should sit up for. A lot of the responsibility for doing the right thing has been handed to us, while products are designed for the moment we buy them, not the weeks we live with their packaging afterwards. The brands that win here will be the ones that design out the faff, not just the waste.

“who's designing for this?”

How might we make the responsible home feel calm, rather than like a recycling centre with a sofa in it?

Want to find out? Join our study

We don't really know yet how this is playing out in people's daily lives - which is exactly why we're going to find out.

From the end of January, Ready Or Not is running an ethnographic study with householders, going into homes to understand how storing, sorting and stockpiling has changed their attitudes, routines and behaviours, and what they need from brands as a result.

It's part of our Insight Partnerships series - more on how that works at the bottom of this piece.

There are two ways to partner on this one:

• Shared places - join with other brands and add your own questions to the mix

• Exclusive access - or take the whole study for your organisation

Either way you'll get real homes, real people and practical opportunities, not just another trends deck ;-)

Places are limited, so get in touch before 13 November to register interest. Register below or send an email and I'll happily talk you through it over a coffee.

Denise Hicks is the founder of Ready Or Not, a strategy, innovation and insight consultancy based in South London. With 25 years’ experience under her belt, she helps brands get closer to what people really need, and turn it into products, services and communications that work for people and planet. She was previously Global Climate Lead at C Space, where she led The S Word, an award-winning 11-market study of how people respond to sustainability, and she chairs Climate Action Lewisham.

About the Ready Or Not Insight Partnerships series

The Insight Partnerships series is a programme of research projects from Ready Or Not, each built around an emerging tension in how people live. We design the study, then invite brands to join as partners - either as a coalition of brands from the same or parallel sectors, or with exclusive access. It's deeper and more tailored than an off-the-shelf syndicated report, and more accessible than commissioning bespoke ethnography alone. Partners shape the study with us from the start, share the cost and the core findings, and get space for their own questions. To find out more or suggest a theme, get in touch at hello@readyornotstrategy.com.