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?
Labor is the most expensive part of food service, and washing dishes is a big cost in labor and space.
Would this be a point in favour of washing dishes then? It results in more employment, but is this considered a win for the environment in this context?
Something else to keep in mind is breakage. Don’t think the compostable stuff breaks all that often but reusable stuff in restaurants sure does.
Stoneware is the worst. I have 50+ year old hand me down ceramics that seem tough as hell. New stuff ends up chipped, cracked and broken far too soon.
I’m certain that modern tableware is built to fail compared to what it’s possible for modern ceramic science to create.
True. In the grand scheme of things, everything is destined to become waste eventually, all we can do is hope that it is useful waste and aim to slow its flow. I guess if compostable waste is more clean than ceramic/metal/glass waste, that is a point in it’s favour, but maybe those materials can be cleanly recycled with proper care/planning?