The complex role of single-use compostable bioplastic food packaging and foodservice ware in a circular economy: Findings from a social innovation lab
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Compostable bioplastic food packaging and foodservice ware is gaining traction as an alternative to petroleum-based plastics and is being considered within institutional and corporate sustainability strategies. However, compostable bioplastics present their own complex challenges and limitations to sustainability across their lifecycle and may in some cases hinder sustainable waste management practices, and therefore the development of a circular economy. Applying a social innovation lab methodological approach, this research explored the challenges and opportunities of compostable bioplastic food packaging and foodservice ware in promoting sustainable production and consumption from a systems perspective. This study draws upon the findings from key informant interviews (n = 28) and three social innovation workshops on “seeing the system” (n = 27), “designing solutions” (n = 23), and “prototyping” (n = 22) with diverse stakeholders from across the food and packaging sector in Canada and some in the United States, as well as with policymakers across different levels of government. Results from the workshop and interviews identified regulatory and infrastructural issues as well as confusion because of the lack of clear standards in the country. Concerns were also raised around the source of compostable bioplastic feedstock, and whether single-use compostable bioplastic truly supported a circular food economy. The findings from this research brought forward recommendations for improving the sustainability and source of compostable bioplastic feedstocks; standards and regulations; explored waste management options such as extended producer responsibility; and addressed the need to focus on single-use item reduction more broadly, as a challenge to the dominant “take, make, and dispose” model.
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 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 | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".