For decades, wealthy nations have transported plastic trash, and the environmental problems that go with it, to poorer countries, but researchers have found a potential bright side to this seemingly unequal trade: plastic waste may provide an economic boon for the lower-income countries.

In a study published in the Journal of World Systems Research, Washington State University sociology PhD alumni Yikang Bai and Jennifer Givens analyzed 11 years of data on the global plastics trade against economic measures for 85 countries. They found that the import of plastic waste was associated with growth in gross domestic product per capita in the lower-income countries.

“Our study offers a nuanced understanding of the global trade in plastic waste,” said Bai, lead author on the study. “Media coverage often has a narrative that developed countries shift environmental harms to less developed countries. There’s another layer of the story: plastic waste could be used as a resource first, even though ultimately it could still add to the environmental burdens of less-developed countries.”

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WSU Insider
Scrap Monster

Portland, Oregon, saw a 60 percent increase in the number of homicides in 2020 compared to 2019.

The 56 homicides the police bureau reported in 2020 is a massive jump from the 35 reported in 2019 and more than double the numbers reported in 2018 and 2017. However, the sudden spike in homicides isn’t a problem exclusive to Portland.

Clay Mosher, a sociology professor at Washington State University Vancouver who studies crime trends, said to be cautious when comparing cities directly.

“You’ve heard the term comparing apples to oranges and comparing across cities… might be equivalent to comparing apples to broccoli, or perhaps even comparing apples to steak,” he said.

Mosher said there are a lot of factors to consider including demographic differences across cities, levels of poverty, median income, the number of police officers per capita, and segregation.

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KOIN

Sociologists at Washington State University found both liberal and conservatives in the United States disapprove of individuals putting the health of their community at risk, but conservatives cared more about why those individuals were taking the risks in the first place.

Sociology professors Christine Horne and Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson asked Americans across the country whether they approved of actions like wearing a mask or stockpiling necessities.

“The more harm there was, the more disapproval there was,” Johnson says. “People were more disapproving of social gatherings than they were about doing a job.”

Johnson and Horne randomly assigned half of their respondents to read a scenario where an individual was putting their own health at risk, and the other half read about someone who was putting the health of the community at risk. They then asked the respondents whether people would disapprove of the behavior in the story and how much they thought liberals and conservatives would disagree.

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Washington State Magazine

In the early 2000s, Jennifer Sherman, a professor of sociology at Washington State University, went to study a poverty-stricken mountain town in Northern California for her thesis. The town had been stripped of its main source of jobs by an environmental ruling that shut down its logging industry, and she planned to look at that ruling’s effects on marriage and family.

Instead, what she found upon meeting folks on the ground was that “every interview, people just talked about their own work ethic, somebody else lacking work ethic, or the value of hard work,” she tells Grow. Even in the absence of jobs, work remained key in measuring human value. With whatever external proof they could find, “people really, really did make the big show of letting me know that, ‘I’m a worker,’” she says.

That attitude toward employment — that belief that work and being a worker is at the core of someone’s identity — is prevalent throughout the U.S.

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Grow
CNBC