Policies to Mitigate Climate Change by Addressing Single-Use Plastic Production and Waste Disposal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Addressing plastic pollution has been viewed as a distraction from Climate Action. But it is not. Plastics derived from fossil-fuels account for 6% of global oil consumption. Therefore, plastics and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are intricately connected with every step of the plastic life cycle, from production to transportation to waste disposal, and thus are a major contributor to climate change. Unsustainable plastic production and use of plastic waste for energy recovery by incineration has been widely criticized because of the release of GHG emissions. In Europe, plastic production and incineration of plastic waste contributes to ∼400 million tonnes of CO2/year. Global GHG emissions from plastics will reach 1.34 gigatons per year by 2030 and 2.8 gigatons per year by 2050. Even when plastics degrade in the environment GHGs are emitted. Policy recommendations to reduce GHG emissions from plastic production and waste disposal include: 1. Immediate phase out of virgin fossil-fuel based plastic production for consumer plastics (e.g., single-use plastics which are difficult to recycle and are major contributors to global plastic pollution). 2. International binding agreements and national policies for a total ban on virgin fossil-fuel based plastic production for single-use consumer plastics by 2030. 3. Consumer plastics to be 100% recyclable by 2030 or produced from sustainable low-carbon 100% bio-based plastics. This policy action aligns with international commitments to curb climate change and to achieve zero plastic waste by transitioning to a low-carbon circular economy.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".