Sustainable Management Strategy for Plastic Market and Regional Equity Issues

Reducing plastic at the source market and changing the way people dispose of plastic waste is critical to improve the environment. This paper aims to quantify the impacts of plastic waste on environment, determine managerial strategies for plastic market by adjusting human actions and study criterion to evaluate equity issues about regional benefit and contribution. This paper first develops the Human-Production-Environment(HPE) model based on the famous Pressure-State-Response(PSR) model. The HPE model has three index systems: human activity index, production index and environment performance index (EPI). After collection of indicators in World Bank website, the plastic production index(PI) was divided into three aspects: waste generation, recycling & recovery and alternative. Then, the Entropy Weight Method(EWM) is applied to calculate the weight of each PI indicator. This paper classifies the human activities index into economic response, policy response and human life response. To quantify the relations between plastic production and human activities, the impact coefficient of each response is introduced and regression method is utilized to obtain a combined impact factor. Aims to determine the minimal achievable level of global plastic waste, this paper determines the optimal proportion of types of human life. By using GM(1,1) prediction method, the plastic waste in the next five years is predicted to be reduced with management strategies. The green contribution coefficient is introduced to consider the regional equity issues in plastic management.