Many cafés and fast food places these days provide disposable dishes and cutlery when you’re eating in. This used to infuriate me, but it seems to be improving slightly now as the trend has moved towards using compostable dishes instead of plastic ones.
However, it’s still waste. It makes me wonder, what is more costly in the long run? Providing customers with compostable items or running hot dishwashers and using soap and water all day to reuse dishes?
This article makes a strong case for using reusable, ceramic plates instead of disposable paper ones. The article treats clean, fresh water as its own thing, valuable in and of itself, which is fair enough. However, it occurred to me that we can assign a CO2 cost to it by considering how much CO2 is generated as a byproduct of desalination. In other words, if we’re doing something to save X amount of water, that’s worth Y amount of CO2 emmissions. I haven’t done the math, but the hypothetical implication is that paper plates are even worse than the article describes and that dishwashing machines are even better. They might actually even payoff their own “carbon debt”.
Thank you for sharing this! I am currently in Vancouver, so it was especially relevant :)
I guess the summary is that paper plates cost an amount to make and are used once, whereas a ceramic plate costs a larger amount to make but can be used many times. At this point it becomes a per-use question of which is more costly from an environmental perspective: manufacturing, transporting and tossing every time vs manufacturing once and washing 150 times to pay off the carbon debt of manufacturing. It seems washing is the solution!