The final straw: a commentary on science, social justice and sustainability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plastic straw bans have become emblematic of local environmental policy, yet their implementation often overlooks key social justice concerns. This commentary explores Wellington City Council's plastic straw-free initiative, critically examining its implications for the disability community through critical disability theory (CDT). Drawing on systems thinking and post-normal science (PNS), this paper argues that environmental policies must avoid conventional, linear solutions that fail to account for marginalised voices. Complexity leadership is proposed as a framework for navigating adaptive systems like cities, ensuring that sustainability efforts are inclusive and just. By integrating CDT with systems thinking, the commentary highlights the need for policies that balance ecological goals with the lived realities of diverse communities, advancing the discourse on just sustainabillites at the local level.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.037 | 0.034 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".