Single-use plastic bag policies in the Southern African development community
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
The growing visibility of plastic pollution, particularly negative environmental impacts of single-use plastic bags, has entered the political debate, triggering policy interventions to control its manufacturing and use. This trend was also felt in Southern Africa, a region with high urbanization, leading to increased resource use and plastic consumption, heavily reliant on tourism, an industry highly impacted by plastic pollution. This paper reviews existing single-use plastic bag reduction policies in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). All 16 SADC members have announced a plastic bag reduction policy, but interventions vary in stages of implementation. Waste management emerged as the most important policy driver and over 55% of SADC members adopted a top-down approach in developing these policies to address these environmental challenges. Most SADC members with existing policies did not conduct public awareness campaigns, raising effectiveness issues. Further research on effective plastic bag reduction policy development, enforcement and monitoring would address an important knowledge gap.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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