Is reusable beverage packaging better than single–use plastic?
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
We assessed the environmental impacts of seven beverage packaging types—reusable glass bottles, reusable PET bottles, reusable PP cups, and single-use PET bottles and cups (with and without recycled content)—in the European context. We identified key emission drivers, including recycling rates, recycled content, electricity carbon intensity, reuse cycles, and transport distances. Our findings show that reusable systems, particularly PP cups, yield the lowest impacts on the environment. In contrast, single–use PET options, especially those without recycled content, generate the highest emissions, though incorporating recycled materials significantly mitigates these impacts. Using Monte Carlo simulation with ±15 % variability in return rates, we confirmed that reuse systems maintain environmental superiority despite behavioral uncertainty. These results highlight an urgent need to invest in reuse infrastructure, which remains underdeveloped despite growing global attention, including at recent forums such as the Busan reuse summit.
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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it