The Politics of Disposable Packaging: An Ethnographic Analysis of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Policies in the United States and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent disruptions in global recycling markets and growing environmental and health concerns surrounding plastics have ignited renewed interest in packaging waste management. Questioning the viability of the current recycling system to contend with the ever-growing disposable packaging waste stream, policymakers are increasingly turning to circular economy policies such as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). EPR holds producers accountable for their products’ end-of-life management. The underlying assumption is that greater responsibility will incentivize producers to reduce costs by designing more environmentally friendly packaging. Despite EPR schemes existing for decades and increasing recycling rates, little evidence suggests they are driving upstream design changes. Moreover, environmental justice advocates are concerned that industry will co-opt EPR policies to advance chemical recycling technologies that disproportionally harm low-income communities and communities of color. Addressing the lack of research on the justice implications of circular policies, this dissertation explores the shifting geographies of power, equity, and access as packaging materials are re-valued. As new circular economy policies emerge across North America, this dissertation examines the politics around disposable packaging, analyzing how packaging EPR policy is conceptualized, negotiated, and contested across time and space. Specifically, I examine how the new measurement systems emerging in these policies are negotiated, paying attention to the ways in which power relations are disrupted or reproduced. The dissertation draws on 24 months of ethnographic research, including event ethnography, a Delphi survey, public discourse analysis, and interviews. Two qualitative case studies (in Maine and Ontario) examine these debates around packaging and their potential environmental justice implications. Overall, this research extended theories around power, knowledge, and action in environmental policy. It contributes to discard studies by challenging common understandings of waste, disposability, and circularity. In addition, this study contributes to theory in the anthropology of policy by exploring how trust and transparency shape calculative practices within neoliberal market-based approaches to environmental governance. This research has practical implications for policymakers and waste managers seeking more effective and just policies. Waste laborers, frontline workers, and fence line communities should be included in the design of EPR programs to avoid simply shifting the environmental and socio-economic burdens of packaging elsewhere.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".