Which of these scenarios causes more damage to the environment?
Every meal I eat I use regular dishes, wash them in hot water, the waste going to a waste water treatment facility, ultimately to the ocean.
Every meal I eat, I eat on paper plates, toss them into the trash, ultimately going to a landfill.
In the paper plate scenario, substitute a waste to energy incinerator for the landfill.
Are we just supposed to evaluate the cleaning vs. throwing away impact or also include production of a single durable plate vs. many paper plates?
My WAG is that the paper plate going to the landfill will be most wasteful, followed by incinderation, and then washing and releasing organics to the ocean is the most environmentally friendly. I think this because I’m strictly looking at how long it takes for the generated waste from each scenario to decompose, and also looking at the energy needed to get it to that point.
A landfill will take minimal energy, but forever to decompose.
Incineration takes a shorter amount of time, but it’s not really decomposition (and it’s also causing air pollution), and takes a high amount of energy.
Washing the dishes takes some energy in the form of hot water, and the process of removing the organics at the waste treatment plant, but it’s almost degraded by the time it would enter the ocean, and would degrade even further pretty quickly.
Pottery and enviro-friendly dish soap is surely better than clogging landfills with paper plates, not to mention saving trees. And if you get your pottery plates from a local artisan you’re not contributing to corporate greed and (possible) forced (or child) labor that makes those plates in a third world country.
What diskwashing detergent do you use and how much?
What heats your water? How much do you use?
Where does your water come from? Are you in Arizona or somewhere in the midwest depeleting a millenia-old aquifer, or pulling the water from the frequent runoff of the Catskills?
How much processing is required to make the water useable? how much power to pump the water to your house?
Would you use bleached pure white paper plates, or unbleached brown ones?
Where did the trees come from to make the paper?
The deeper you dig, the worse it gets…
It’s like trying to figure out how much of your income goes to taxes, and by the time you get to “how much of the cost of gas to truck groceries to the store where I bought them was taxes?” By then, it’s too many wheels within wheels…
Just my WAG (wild-assed guess) plates washed manually in moderately warm water with a little bit of detergent - is most economical.
Leaving them out for the cat to lick clean is least environmentally detrimental, depending on whether you use kitty litter and what kind toilet paper and how much you use when you get masive diarrhea afterwards…
I guess the only way to evaluate the question would be to include everything in the pollution process. To get into the manufacturing, packaging, type, and shipping of the plates themselves I think overcomplicates the question.
Personally the water I drink comes from reservoirs that are fed almost exclusively from rainwater. The only treatment that I know that the water undergoes is the addition of a caustic in order to prevent leaching of lead from old pipes.
I guess it is kind of choose your poison. Is it worse to dump crap into the ocean, or to dump it in a landfill which may eventually leach pollutants into the ocean?
Obviously I don’t know the answers, otherwise I would not have asked the question. My daughter asked me, and I drew a blank. Thanks for the thoughtful responses.
This might be a useful exercise to teach your daughter about the life cycle of things, if you’re so inclined, and have her come to her own conclusions.
I would think, depending on what kind of detergent you use, that a daily comparison between the two comes down decidedly in favour of washing the dishes (with, of course, all sorts of caveats). Water is pretty easily recycled and the energy cost of getting it to you is probably minimal. The washed-off food is biodegradable and can be put to good use (the sewage treatment plant for Boston produces fertiliser, among other things). The cost of transporting the water to the treatment plant is likely minimal. The main problem is the cost of heating the water. That one is hard to account for but my WAG is that the cost of heating the water for a full dish load is less than the energy to make all the disposable items (plates, utensils, etc.).
The paper plates need to be transported to you; the garbage carried away and dealt with. If it’s buried I can’t think of anything positive that results. If incinerated then it might be turned into a bit of power but water treatment can do the same thing.
I find it hard to believe that the environmental cost of transporting the dishwater to and from your house to be worse than transporting the paper plates. You’re either left with landfill or fertiliser. So on a daily basis I think washing is solidly ahead.
We probably should factor in the cost of creating and transporting the dishes. However, if you keep the dishes for 20 years I would guess that the cost, amortised over that time, if extremely small in comparison.
Assuming you have a full load, a dishwasher will be more efficient than manual washing - unless you can do each dish/utensil in a few seconds with a cup of water per dish (also, the energy used to heat the water is actually pretty small compared to the energy used by the dishwasher, best however if you have a gas water heater).
Even just looking at water usage alone, washing the dishes probably still wins: It takes a lot of water to make paper. And that’s before we even consider the land used to grow the trees, and the various chemicals involved in paper-making, and the fuel burned to carry the plates to the store, and so on.