Big or Small Sustainability? A Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Frogmore Paper Mill

This talk focuses on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between Frogmore Paper Mill, a historic paper recycling mill on a small island in the Gade Valley, in Apsley, near Hemel Hempstead, and researchers at the University of Essex Psychology Department and Essex Business School. The aims of the KTP are to help Frogmore innovate in terms of its sustainability, heritage, business capabilities, and digital change efforts between 2024 and 2027. This exciting project is funded by Innovate UK, part of UKRI, and is set against the backdrop of a devasting fire at Frogmore Mill in 2022, which led to its partial closure to the public. Frogmore is now expecting to re-open in early 2026.

Sustainability discourses often focus on large corporations, governments, global models, ethical prescriptions, and discourses such as those evident in the SDGs or ESG reporting standards. In contrast, this project investigates how small non-profits navigate diverse sustainability challenges more locally, how they try to blend local, grassroots practices (which we term “Small-s sustainability”) with more professional, expert, market-oriented sustainability discourses (“Big-S Sustainability”).

Operational since 1803, today Frogmore navigates tensions between different kinds of sustainability. It tries to balance its history, heritage, volunteer ethos, and local environmental responsibilities, with its commercial offerings, business sustainability, revenue streams, fundraising and financial bottom-line survival. This balance involves tough decisions, for example dedicating time and resources to protecting wildlife (swans, moorhens, crayfish and other wildlife) on the river around the mill, engaging local elderly people to take part in garden projects, inviting local schools to visit and learn about paper recycling, keeping traditional paper making skills and machine heritage alive, adding petals, seeds and even elephant poo into recycled paper for customers, but also managing limited resources, allocating funds to repair the mill buildings, liaising with funders, and marketing the mill to diverse customer segments.

The KTP employs a multidisciplinary approach, integrating psychological surveys for understanding Mill visitor beliefs and attitudes about sustainability and climate change, with collaborative activities and digital change advice to support Frogmore’s re-launch to the public in 2025, with a renewed focus on customers, visitors, service innovations, and digital media/communications. We are using statistical analysis, psychological techniques, service design, and “activity theory”, a framework for understanding socio-technical change, innovations, tensions, and historical contradictions that shape Frogmore’s transformative journey.

By the end of the KTP in early 2027, we hope the project will have furnished us with many insights on sustainable innovation to share with the heritage sector, and new ways of understanding how small non-profits navigate different kinds of sustainability, such as big, small, old, new, environmental, and business sustainability. Such insights will offer valuable lessons for non-profit and heritage professionals, managers, communities, volunteer groups, funders, and researchers. We trust the KTP will offer positive impacts for Frogmore directly, as it continues to breathe new life into paper’s rich history as a key part of the old industrial revolution, and the new digital revolution.