Do Eco-Fees Encourage Design for the Environment? The Relationship between Environmental Handling Fees and Recycling Rates for Printed Paper and Packaging
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study undertook a critical examination of Ontario’s extended producer responsibility scheme for the residential “Blue Box” recycling program, specifically examining the relationship between packaging fee rates and material-specific recycling rates. Using data collected for each of the 23 materials found in the residential recycling program over the past decade, a regression model was developed to gauge what relationship (if any) packaging recycling rates have with fee rates, costs of material management and revenue from the sale of recyclable material. The modeling in this study indicates that packaging fee rates have no effect on packaging recycling rates. Recycling rates were positively correlated with material revenue and negatively correlated with material management costs. There is no evidence that suggests that Ontario’s fee model used to allocate environmental handling fees to individual materials encourages waste diversion or design for the environment. The disconnect in the results and the intended function of packaging fee rates calls into question the appropriateness of Ontario’s fee rate methodology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it