The Montreal Protocol or the Paris Agreement as a Model for a Plastics Treaty?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The notion that a plastics treaty is necessary is gaining traction, but there is less agreement as to its content. Some, including this author, have suggested that a plastics treaty should be modelled on treaties such as the Montreal Protocol, which sets out a broad commitment to end the use of a particular material and then introduce regulations to ban particular forms of that material over time. This approach has an immediate appeal—it sends a signal to states and to industry that they must change their behaviors and products, while giving time to adapt to the new regulation and develop alternative materials or ways of working. The potential drawback of this approach is that some states simply will not accept such rigid standards. In addition, some states may prefer a second approach that is more obviously rooted in the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, which assigns different obligations to parties according to their respective capacities. Within the climate change regime, the Paris Agreement takes both approaches, asking states to set their own nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to emissions reductions (common but differentiated responsibilities) and then to revise these NDCs over time through an iterative process to deliver progressively more ambitious targets for emissions reduction (moving toward a ban) or mitigation. In reality, neither approach is entirely suited to regulating plastics, so a new approach to treaty-making is required. This new approach should focus on the outcomes desired rather than the practices that need to be regulated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.040 | 0.008 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".