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Maine

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Exploring Reusable Takeout Packaging As An Alternative To Disposable Plastics In Maine's Restaurant Industry, Jared Wildwistle Dec 2022

Exploring Reusable Takeout Packaging As An Alternative To Disposable Plastics In Maine's Restaurant Industry, Jared Wildwistle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the emergence of plastic over 100 years ago, businesses have increasingly relied on them to protect products. While convenient, the proliferation of plastic packaging is a major contributor to pollutants in the soil, oceans, and bodies of humans and animals alike. Goals in states like Maine seek to reduce the amount of waste and alleviate these issues. However, the deeply embedded popularity of disposable packaging and lack of reliable waste processing capabilities has caused Maine to fall short of its goals. While solutions need to focus on reducing the amount of packaging entering the economy, most businesses rely on …


Grassroots Diplomacy And Vernacular Law: The Discourse Of Food Sovereignty In Maine, John Welton May 2017

Grassroots Diplomacy And Vernacular Law: The Discourse Of Food Sovereignty In Maine, John Welton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the discourse of food sovereignty in Maine, a coalition of small-scale farmers, consumers, and citizens building an alternative food system based on a distributed form of production, processing, selling, purchasing, and consumption. This distribution occurs at the municipal level through the enactment of ordinances. Using critical-rhetorical field methods, I argue that the discourse of food sovereignty in Maine develops a ‘constitutive’ rhetoric that composes rural society through affective relationships. Advocates engage the industrial food system to both expose its systemic bias against small-scale farming and construct their own discourse of belonging. Based upon agrarian values such as …