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Disposal of plastic waste has become a widely discussed issue, due to the potential environmental impact of improper waste disposal. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) packaging accounted for 44.7% of single-serve beverage packaging in the US in 2021, and 12% of global solid waste. A strategic solution is needed to manage plastic packaging solid waste. Major beverage manufacturers have pledged to reduce their environmental footprint by taking steps towards a sustainable future. The PET bottle has several properties that make it an environmentally friendly choice. The PET bottle has good barrier properties as its single-layer, mono-material composition allows it to be more easily recycled. Compared to glass, the PET bottle is lightweight and has a lower carbon footprint in production and transportation. With modern advancements to decontamination processes in the recycling of post-consumer recycled PET (rPET or PCR), it has become a safe material for reuse as beverage packaging. It has been 30 years since the FDA first began certifying PCR PET production processes as compliant for production of food contact PCR PET, for application within the United States. This article provides an overview of PET bottle-to-bottle recycling and guidance for beverage manufacturers looking to advance goals for sustainability.

This article presents the findings of a systematic qualitative analysis of research in the ethics of digital trace data use in learning and education. From the resulting analysis of 77 peer-reviewed studies, we (1) map the char acteristics of research by study type, academic community, institutional setting, and national context; (2) identify the primary ethical concerns and related responses; and (3) highlight the research gaps. Four areas of focus are identified in this emerging area: (1) privacy, informed consent, and data ownership; (2) validity and integrity; (3) ethical decision making; and (4) governance and accountability. We highlight the lack of evidence particularly for preschool and school-aged children and the disparate communities working in this domain, and we suggest a more cohesive approach, where the wider learning and educational ecosystem is recognized, explicit engagement with ethical theory is central, and mid- to long-term ethical issues are considered alongside immediate concerns.

The European strategy for plastics, as part of the EU’s circular economy action plan, should support the reduction in plastic waste. One key element in this action plan is the improvement of the economics and quality of recycled plastics. In addition, an important goal is that by 2030, all plastics packaging placed on the EU market must either be reusable or can be recycled in a cost-effective manner. This means that, at the end, a closed-loop recycling of food packaging materials should be established. However, the use of recyclates must not result in less severe preventive consumer protection of food packaging materials. This may lead to a conservative evaluation of authorities on post-consumer recyclates in food packaging applications. On the other hand, over-conservatism might over-protect the consumer and generate insurmountable barriers to the application of post-consumer recyclates for food packaging and, hence, counteract the targets of circular economy. The objective of this review is to provide an insight into the evaluation of post-consumer recyclates applied in direct contact to food. Safety assessment criteria as developed by the European Food Safety Authority EFSA will be presented, explained, and critically discussed.

While the role of laws and regulations in structuring markets is well established, it is less understood how rule evasion affects the evolution of markets or how the interaction between regulators and the regulated about the meaning of compliance influences this effect. The authors study this issue by looking at the development of the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market in France, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1999 to 2009. In all three countries, this market involved financial innovations designed to evade regulations. The authors identify diverging trends in the ABCP market that are a result of whether and how regulators were embedded in the different interpretive communities that defined regulatory compliance, such embeddedness being dependent on their discretionary and sanctioning power as well as their expertise. Focusing on these regulatory networks that embed institutions in markets, they propose a synthesis of relational and institutional accounts of the embeddedness of markets.

NOABSTRACTCompliance with the law is not solely a legal issue but also a social one, shaped by the competing demands of different power structures.The research methodology is based on a review of literature from legal theory, sociology of law, and education studies. The primary method used is conceptual synthesis.The conceptual synthesis reveals that legal non-compliance is not only the result of individual choices or lack of legal awareness, but often emerges from conflicts between competing hierarchies that exert normative pressure.The role of education is emphasized as both a space of normative conflict and a potential tool for fostering legal consciousness, provided that pedagogical approaches are responsive to the dynamics of social influence and power.The analysis remains largely theoretical and lacks empirical validation through field studies or case analyses. Psychological and institutional factors that affect legal behavior are acknowledged but not fully explored.Researching legal non-compliance through the lens of hierarchical rivalry broadens the analytical scope beyond legal doctrine, but also can be helpful in sociological analysis.

This article offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of legal endogeneity-a powerful process through which institutionalized organizational structures influence judicial conceptions of compliance with antidiscrimination law. It finds that organizational structures (e.g., grievance and evaluation procedures, antiharassment policies) become symbolic indicators of rational governance and compliance with anti-discrimination laws, first within organizations, but eventually in the judicial realm as well. Lawyers and judges tend to infer nondiscrimination from the mere presence of those structures. Judges increasingly defer to organizational structures in their opinions, ultimately inferring nondiscrimination from their presence. Legal endogeneity theory is tested by analyzing a random sample of 1,024 federal employment discrimination opinions (1965-99) and is found to have increased over time. Judicial deference is most likely when plaintiffs lack clout and when the legal theories require judges to rule on unobservable organizational attributes. The authors argue that legal endogeneity weakens the impact of law when organizational structures are viewed as indicators of legal compliance even in the face of discriminatory actions. Adapted from the source document.

This article demonstrates the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures. Foucault's depiction of two important processes, surveillance and normalization, show how rankings change perceptions of legal education through both coercive and seductive means. This approach advances organizational theory by highlighting conditions that affect the prevalence and effectiveness of buffering. Decoupling is not determined solely by the external enforcement of institutional pressures or the capacity of organizational actors to buffer or hide some activities. Members' tendency to internalize these pressures, to become self-disciplining, is also salient. Internalization is fostered by the anxiety that rankings produce, by their allure for the administrators who try to manipulate them, and by the resistance they provoke. Rankings are just one example of the public measures of performance that are becoming increasingly influential in many institutional environments, and understanding how organizations respond to these measures is a crucial task for scholars.

Looking inside organizations at the different positions, expertise, and autonomy of the actors, the authors use multisite ethnographic data on safety practices to develop a typology of how the regulator, as the focal actor in the regulatory process, is interpreted within organizations. The findings show that organizational actors express constructions of the regulator as an ally, threat, and obstacle that vary with organizational expertise, authority, and continuity of relationship between the organizational member and the regulator. The article makes three contributions to the current understandings of organizational governance and regulatory compliance, thereby extending both institutional and ecological accounts of organizations' behavior with respect to their environments. First, the authors document not only variation across organizations but variable compliance within an organization. Second, the variations described do not derive from alternative institutional logics, but from variations in positions, autonomy, and expertise within each organization. From their grounded theory, the authors hypothesize that these constructions carry differential normative interpretations of regulation and probabilities for compliance, and thus the third contribution, the typology, when correlated with organizational hierarchy provides the link between microlevel action and discourse and organizational performance.

In the past decade, public sector organizations around the world have worked to simplify administrative processes as a way to improve user experience and compliance. Academic evidence on administrative burden supports this approach and there is a strong body of research showing that learning costs, compliance costs, and psychological costs help to explain why residents do not always take up programs for which they are eligible. This article considers the role of these types of costs in a different set of resident-state interactions: compliance with regulations. We present the results of three large field experiments aimed at improving resident compliance with municipal housing codes using targeted behavioral interventions. We find that contacting property owners earlier, redesigning first notices, and proactively communicating with previous violators, can significantly improve compliance by 14.7 percent, 3.3 percent, and 9.2 percent, respectively, with costs savings ranging from 6 to 15 percent of a city’s annual enforcement budget. Our results counterintuitively suggest that sometimes adding steps to an administrative process can reduce the costs associated with the resident-state interaction.

States often violate international agreements, both accidentally and intentionally. To process complaints efficiently, states can create formal, pretrial procedures in which governments can negotiate with litigants before a case ever goes to court. If disputes are resolved during pretrial negotiations, it can be very difficult to tell what has happened. Are governments coming into compliance? If so, are they only doing so when they have accidentally committed a violation or even when they are intentionally resisting? Or are challenges simply being dropped? This paper presents a formal model to address these questions. We develop our theory in the context of the European Union (EU). To test our model, we collect a new dataset of over 13,000 Commission infringement cases against EU member states (2003–2013). Our results suggest that accidental and intentional noncompliance both occur, but that intentional noncompliance is more common in the EU. We find that the Commission is an effective, if imperfect, monitor and enforcer of international law. The Commission can correct intentional noncompliance, but not always. It strategically drops cases that it believes it is unlikely to win.