Why don’t we reuse our food packaging? Insights from two organizations implementing packaging return systems to avoid single-use plastics
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
Abstract Plastic pollution is a pervasive and urgent environmental issue, caused by our unsustainable use of single-use plastics (plastic items that are commonly discarded after one use). Many of these plastics are used in food packaging, frequently ending up in the environment. A potential solution to this problem is packaging reuse systems, meaning systems to incentivize consumers to return used packaging for refill (by charging a deposit) or appealing to environmentally conscious consumers to bring in their own packaging for shopping (e.g., in zero-waste stores). Deposit return systems (DRS) are well-established in several countries; however, they are often used for single-use packaging with the purpose to improve the recycling rate of plastic packaging (and therefore do not focus on reuse). Further, DRS mainly apply to beverages, not solid food containers. Nevertheless, they are well-studied systems, highlighting key concerns for the implementation of innovative solutions to keep packaging waste out of the environment (e.g., aspects of hygiene, transport and logistics, brand identity and consumer behavior). In this study, we explore how packaging reuse systems are implemented for solid and semi-solid food products by two organizations (one in Canada and the other in Germany) concerned with reducing plastic waste in the food sector.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 it