Factors related to recycling plastic packaging in Finland's new waste management scheme.

Plastic packaging exemplifies recycling's potential; 95 percent of plastic's material use vanishes after a short first-use cycle. Yet over half of plastic packaging could be recycled effectively, economically, and in an environmentally sound manner, with individuals and households playing a focal role in raising recycling rates. This paper draws on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to identify and examine household plastic sorting and recycling factors in Finland's new recycling scheme. The results of a regression analysis generally support existing research, except paradoxically, the easier it was to obtain recycling information the less people recycled. TPB's attitude (environmental concerns) and perceived behavioural control factors (low behavioural costs, and dealing with waste) showed significant positive relationships with Finnish recycling behaviour; the subjective norm (social norms) had an insignificant relationship. Age, living quarters, the time spent recycling, the distance to collection points, and the willingness to improve also related significantly to diligent plastic waste sorting. In addition to re-examining the information type and delivery, the significant role of costs and facilitating conditions offer intervention possibilities to support households to recycle more plastic packaging.

Brand safety: the effects of controversial video content on pre-roll advertising.

Newspapers have reported instances of famous brands' ads running as pre-rolls to terrorist videos on YouTube. Subsequent brand safety fears have led to advertisers pulling their YouTube ads. This study, a lab experiment, tested the effects of program quality and content-particularly violent, sexual or extremist content-on pre-roll ads. The experiment used measures from studies showing significant broadcast TV content effects on mid-roll advertising, using more extreme cable TV content to increase the chances of finding significant effects on pre-roll ads. Overall, the effects were minimal, with no effects on brand attitudes, ad liking, or three ad memory components-encoding, storage, and retrieval. In contrast to research showing program context effects on mid-roll advertising, context effects (e.g., on brand safety) do not seem an issue for pre-roll ads. A brand's reputation might suffer negative effects from pre-roll advertising in other ways, however. A limitation is that this study did not re-test the effects of controversial content on mid-roll advertising.

Evidence of Subdivisions on Evolutionary Timescales in a Large, Declining Marsupial Distributed across a Phylogeographic Barrier.

Major prehistoric forces, such as the climatic shifts of the Pleistocene, can remain visible in a species' population genetics. Inference of refuges via genetic tools is useful for conservation management as it can identify populations whose preservation may help retain a species' adaptive potential. Such investigation is needed for Australia's southern hairy-nosed wombat (Lasiorhinus latifrons), whose conservation status has recently deteriorated, and whose phylogeographic history during the Pleistocene may be atypical compared to other species. Its contemporary range spans approximately 2000 km of diverse habitat on either side of the Spencer Gulf, which was a land bridge during periods of Pleistocene aridity that may have allowed for migration circumventing the arid Eyrean barrier. We sampled from animals in nearly all known sites within the species' current distribution, mainly using non-invasive methods, and employed nuclear and mitochondrial DNA analyses to assess alternative scenarios for Pleistocene impacts on population structure. We found evidence for mildly differentiated populations at the range extremes on either side of Spencer Gulf, with secondary contact between locations neighbouring each side of the barrier. These extreme western and eastern regions, and four other regions in between, were genetically distinct in genotypic clustering analyses. Estimates indicate modest, but complex gene flow patterns among some of these regions, in some cases possibly restricted for several thousand years. Prior to this study there was little information to aid risk assessment and prioritization of conservation interventions facilitating gene flow among populations of this species. The contributions of this study to that issue are outlined.