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?
I seem to recall many years ago it was reported that a ceramic mug had such a high embodied energy that it was equivalent to 1000+ paper cups.
This definitely needs fact checking but it’s an interesting consideration when you’re considering the impact on the planet
So I’m in the clear after 3 years of morning coffees?
Erm. ChatGPT reckons it’s closer to 20-40 cups for the same embodied energy. So my recollection was well off the mark.
I’ll trust a stranger memory more than a LLM answer.
Chatgpt is not a source.
Yeah, it’s similar to the debate around whether paper bags or tote bags are more eco friendly. As others mentioned here in regards to dishwashers, what likely matters most is how many times an item must be used before it offsets the environmental cost of it’s own production.
Perhaps how long it lasts before breaking down after it’s lifespan as well… I.e. if all of humanity disappeared how long to return to a non-human impacted state?
Plastics and other such pollutants will last for millions of years… So regardless of useful lifespan, pollutant lifespan is far larger.
If everything we ever used was either wood or paper based, then even if useful lifespan were decades, pollutant lifespan before breaking down would be less than a century. How many times should you use something when the harmful particles it’s made of will persist in the ecosystem for 10 million years?
Idk which is better, or how to measure the difference though.