MODS: I recognize that there may be no final answer on this and it may be a question of personal preference, but I’m hoping for some facts to inform debate, so maybe we can at least start in GQ? Thanks.
I live in Southern California and consider myself fairly environmentally and water-conscious.
I use resealable plastic bags because for some storage/transport options they are just really convenient. When possible–ie, when they’re not oily and haven’t been used for animal products–I wash them by hand and re-use them.
Same with aluminum foil. If I can wipe it down (clean it without ripping it to shreds), I do, and either re-use or recycle.
My logic is that even though it takes valuable water to do this, water is renewable and conservable, but petroleum and aluminum are not.
However, with the severe drought in California, I wonder if I shouldn’t simply throw away soiled foil and resealable bags. In other words, is the crisis so bad I ought to prioritize water over non-renewables? Can anyone offer any facts to help me make this choice?
NB: I am already redoubling my efforts to use more easily cleanable and reusable containers, thank you in advance for suggesting that; and although I believe that agriculture really ought to conserve more water too, my question is geared towards the behavior of individuals like myself.
Aluminum gets recycled in many locations. You will need to ask the agency in charge of your trash pickup whether they do or not, because if they don’t then they need to separate it back out. But that part has me confused - are you putting it into recycling or not? And why would you wash it before putting it in the recycling?
I dunno how accurate this is, but it’s a start: This water footprint PDF says that aluminum costs 88 liters of water / kg of aluminum to manufacture/process, but I couldn’t verify that with the primary lit it cited.
I weighed last night’s burrito foil wrapper, which my scale put at about 0.1 oz (+/- 0.1 oz). Google says that means it took about 250ml to make that piece of foil, or at least that much aluminum. That’s a little less than a soda can’s worth of water.
You might not save much water, in other words. This webpage (non-scholarly) says that recycling aluminum does save a lot of energy and potentially hazardous wastes/emissions, though.
In the bigger picture, residential water use takes up about 10%-20% of California’s water usage (another non-scholarly cite). The remaining 80% goes to agriculture.
You’d probably save more water by eating a few meat-less meals a week.
IMHO California’s approach to water conservation (brush your teeth a few seconds!) is more a feel-good measure, or perhaps awareness building, because it’s easier to convince Joe Schmoe to turn off the tap a little earlier than to fight all the combined might of the growers and ranchers, which really use up the water (and, to be fair, feed the rest of us).
And since we’re on the topic, you can also save water by throwing things into a full dishwasher instead of washing by hand (especially newer machines). Or you can do the thing where you fill three wash basins, the first with plain hot water, the second with soapy water, and the third with a bit of bleach. Scrub off food into the compost bin before washing, then dip it through the three basis. Gets them “clean enough” to be sanitary if not sparkling, and you can generally use less water that way than keeping the faucet running the whole time.
I reuse my plastic bags without rinsing them. First, I never buy them, I reuse the ones that I put veggies in at the supermarket, or the ones that food comes packaged in. If necessary, I just wipe them out dry with a towel. It takes me years to go through a box of foil. I’m very good about resisting the temptation to turn on the tap and letting it run until it’s hot.
You missed the OP’s point: He has two choices: re-use aluminum foil at home, washing it between re-uses. OR recycle the foil after one use. Looking just at his personal resource consumption, the first way consumes water but saves on aluminum. The second saves water but consumes aluminum.
His question is this: Considering the entire system from ore through recycling center and re-manufacture and eventual use a second time, which choice saves more total resources? And in a situation of extreme drought, should one prioritize water use over other resource use (e.g. ore, electricity, transportation) which are not is as short supply as water is?
An unstated corollary of the OPs question is how should one prioritize local resource use versus distant resource use? e.g. the washing water is consumed there in drought-ridden SoCal. But what if the replacement aluminum is mined in, say, ore-rich Wyoming & converted to foil in the electricity-rich Pacific Northwest. (all factoids made up).
These are difficult questions to be sure. The challenge with almost any of these tradeoff decisions is that we don’t have a clean place to draw a boundary around the system. So we can’t even decide which things we ought to include for measurement. Much less have actual measured data to put into the trade-off formulas we’d hope to develop.
Which is one of the reasons economics is an effective decision-making apparatus. If one simply chooses whatever is cheapest for them, they have a simple decision metric and a built-in problem boundary. Depending on how the rest of the economy / society is arranged that can be very far from a globally optimal solution. But it IS easy to decide. Read up on “negative externalities” for more.
That’s a shame, because plastic burns really well and incinerating trash can generate a good deal of energy. The water is renewable, but so is the plastic: it gets burned (or eaten by microbes—eventually), turning it into CO₂, algae convert the CO₂ to something else, sink to the bottom of the ocean, turn into oil over time, the oil gets pumped up and turned into plastic.
IMO you should be looking at the energy use: how much energy does it take to heat your bag washing water vs how much energy does it cost to manufacture the bag? I’m guessing for plastic bags the two would be roughly in the same neighborhood, which brings me to my main point:
WTF, wash plastic bags!?
I’m sure you could use your time more productively. For instance, by running an errant on your bicycle or by foot rather than by car. That saves you a whole pile of bags worth of oil/CO₂.
Reusing/recycling aluminum makes more sense, though, as getting the metal out of the ore uses enormous amounts of electricity.
Also, while people still flush their toilets and washing their cars with drinking water I wouldn’t be too worried about normal household water use.
I don’t have time for fuller remarks now, but I will note that in my city–and in many–anything in the recycling that is dirty gets sorted out and thrown away. So aluminum foil with food on it must be cleaned to actually get recycled. Needless to say they don’t advertise this.
Here in Holland they collect different kinds of trash separately, presumably for the purpose of composting/recycling. But then some cities just put everything in one big pile to be incinerated. They keep collecting it separately to make the citizens feel good…
Also, they still insist on separating batteries although it’s been many years since those contained anything objectionable, you could probably eat a few with no ill effects.
Reusing aluminum foil makes some sense, but cleaning it just so it can recycled doesn’t make sense IMO. Like I said, there are better ways to spend your (and the city’s) time and money.