ABSTRACT
Introduction Multigenerational family households rarely form out of environmental concern – or an intentional desire to be ‘green’. More typically, they form because of financial pressures, caring responsibilities or to accommodate disruptions in extended families such as divorce or unemployment (Klocker et al. 2012). Yet, they offer important, innate opportunities to reduce resource consumption. On a per capita basis, household size is inversely related to resource consumption and waste production (Liu et al. 2003). By housing more family members under one roof, multigenerational family living presents unheralded opportunities to save energy, water, building materials and land. Our ethnographic research with multigenerational family households in Wollongong, in the Illawarra region of southeastern Australia, explored the ways in which resources are consumed and shared in their rhythms of everyday life. These families inadvertently reduced their consumption of material resources by sharing space and everyday objects: white goods, furniture, cooking equipment, electronics, clothing, books, food, swimming pools and more. Although these sharing practices were not intentionally ‘green’, they nonetheless obviated the need for additional purchases to be made.
