Is there an empirical environmental Kuznets curve relationship between mismanaged plastic waste per capita and income per capita? A caveat
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Coupled Natural and Human Systems, Environmental Contamination and Remediation
- Keywords
- Environmental Kuznets curve, plastic waste, income level
- Copyright
- © 2019 Uehara et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Is there an empirical environmental Kuznets curve relationship between mismanaged plastic waste per capita and income per capita? A caveat. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27883v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27883v1
Abstract
A study by Barnes (2019) concluded that there exists an empirical environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) relationship between mismanaged plastic waste per capita and income per capita. However, this result needs careful interpretation. The study adopted data that used the World Bank database to compute mismanaged plastic waste amounts. Because data to compute them were not available for all countries, missing data were estimated by relating them to economic classification (i.e., income level). In other words, the data used for the analysis by Barnes simply assumed—without scientific validation—that mismanaged plastic waste amounts are related to economic classification (i.e., income level).
Author Comment
This is the first version and has not been published anywhere.