Child Health Implications of Plastic Waste Reduction in West Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rapidly growing, unregulated plastic litter has created a multitude of environmental and economic problems in developing countries. The problems are particularly serious for single use plastic (SUP) products that cannot be recycled. While the case for plastic waste reduction is clear, it may conflict with public health and other social objectives. Using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from Ghana and Nigeria, this paper considers the potential for health damage from waste reduction policies that reduce household use of SUP drinking-water containers. The econometric analysis provides strong evidence that SUP containers significantly reduce child mortality and incidence of diarrhea, after controlling for other, widely cited determinants in the literature. By implication, general measures to reduce plastic use may also increase childhood illness and death. The study demonstrates how plastic-waste reduction policies should not be assessed in isolation from their public health implications for poor households and suggests countervailing measures that can be taken to address the SUP waste problem. The study can be replicated in any of the 73 countries where DHS data include the use of plastic containers as household water sources.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".