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Plastic recycling is critical for dematerializing of plastics. It has a profound implication on decoupling economic growth from environmental pressure and advancing waste plastic governance domestically and internationally while identifying drivers that might improve decoupling. In this study, plastic consumption and recycling patterns are presented, and the factors influencing the acceleration of dematerialization subsequent to the ban were investigated in the G7 countries and China. The results show that plastic consumption increases from 7.60 million metric tons (mt) to 12.60 mt between 2017 and 2019, and subsequently rapidly decreases to 6.84 mt in 2020. The plastic recycling rate drastically decreased by 21.3% in 2017, and decreased slightly from 2017 to 2020, at an annual rate of 2.9% on average. China's ban shocked the decoupling trends, which showed resilience and motivated the development of robust plastic recycling, and the global recycling transformation pattern accelerated the dematerialization of plastics. Decoupling performances of the G7 and China gradually stabilized in 2019, and all the countries were strongly decoupled in 2020, although decoupling index (DI) fluctuates from 2017 to 2020. Among the recycling-trading drivers, the improvement of waste plastic quality in recycling contributes more to decoupling, the recycling rate shows a more negative decoupling effect on China before the ban, and the population effect is weak relative to other influencing factors. The factors revealed the mechanism of decoupling of plastic consumption in the recycling-trading process, and the recyclability improvement in terms of plastic quality is important for dematerialization. [Display omitted] • G7 and China showed resilience to strong decoupling after the China's ban. • Improved IPAT method is proposed to study the factors influencing decoupling. • Decomposition of dematerialization factors quantifies the decoupling effect. • Plastics recycling quality primarily contributes to achieving decoupling. • Recycling rate adversely affects decoupling of China and population effect is weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancing toilet technologies to address public health and sanitation issues are a concern of governments and organizations. This article mainly studies the assessment methods for the public toilets and some rural toilets considering from design to demolition to assist for the innovation of toilet technologies. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods were adopted to identify the assessment indicators and rank the weight. The outcome of Toilet Assessment Scheme (TAS), which includes a set of weightings and a classification system for the selected assessment indicators and sub-indicators. The weight calculation result showed that water resources, ecology, and indoor environmental quality are relatively high, which indicates that saving water, protecting the environment and optimizing the toilet environment should be given priority at the current stage. The individual questionnaire experts from the perspective of gender, profession, and generation, have different emphases on the evaluation scheme. This study can improve the comprehensiveness of toilet evaluation under the distinct background conditions, and will play a relevant role in the promotion of new toilet technology. The TAS can accelerate the toilet revolution in areas where toilets are scarce, and thus will improve the sanitary and health conditions of these populations. Considering the complex factors of the toilet comprehensively, and adopting the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method to ascertain the weighting of Toilet Assessment Scheme (TAS), the scheme was provided to solve the comparison and evaluation of the different toilets. Image 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]