The Disposables Debate

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The postulation of disposables is that they need to go, in order to solve the waste problem, plastic pollution to be more precise. No one wan’t to use disposables anymore, whether its straws, plastic bags, cutlery or plastic bottles. However, I will bet you that almost no one can explain why. Luckily, I spent 20 hours a week for two months working for the university last year looking into the disposables at the university. So, I thought I’d take the time to shed some light on the situation and hopefully clear up any confusion there might have been.

As we transition into a circular economy a common goal is to eliminate waste, with disposables as a starting point. As a member of the Green Office board of a university that still makes use of disposables, we get questions around the decision all too often. Unfortunately, I have some bad news, the decision isn’t as simple as it sounds. Contrary to popular belief, disposables aren’t all that bad.

The carbon footprint of a disposable may be lower than of a reusable product.

  • They are not made to last, thus use a lot less energy and materials to be produced.

  • They are usually significantly lighter (less materials) which also means less emissions in transportation.

  • There is the possibility to recycle them.

  • They do not need to be cleaned, which saves huge amounts of energy, water and chemicals/emissions in the use phase.

  • It’s easy.

To elaborate, disposables are made with the sole purpose of being used once, which means they can use cheap materials, don’t require any special complicated treatment to increase durability and generally require less materials. This makes them very light, a few grams as opposed to a few hundred grams, drastically reducing the emissions in transport and do not have to be washed. Lastly, due to the fact that they are typically made of plastic (or a simple material), they can often be recycled, where recycling technology is an upcoming market and is constantly being improved. In contrast, alternatives made of stone or earth-ware and ceramic are not recyclable at all and other products may be more difficult to recycle as they are very diverse with unique and more complex materials.

For any food related service hygiene is crucial and strictly regulated, meaning that any product that comes in contact with food and a consumer has to fulfil very specific requirements, such as being washed at a high temperature. I think the energy intensity and emissions of washing products is often greatly underestimated, in fact it may even account for half of the total carbon footprint.

The last point requires a detailed explanation, that I will try to demonstrate in an anecdote. After much frustration about the fact that no one buys a plastic bag for the plastic, in actuality, it’s a last resort in the situation that we forget a bag but know that we already have (several) reusable bags lying at home and can’t carry everything by hand. Then I started to think about all my nutella and peanut butter jars, how ridiculous that we have to throw them away just to get the same product in a brand new jar. However, when I started to try develop a plan to implement the idea of paying a deposit and returning the product to a supermarket (as an example) I was informed about the complex logistics involved in the collection, washing and quality control of the products.

So as you might have realised, it’s a complex situation and it’s not that simple to transition away from disposables. My university for example would have to entirely change their current logistics to collect products and finding a space, employees and apparatus to wash them. There are also countries that face water scarcity and therefore prefer disposables, as they can’t afford to waste water on washing dishes. Regardless, disposables of course also bring a myriad of problems that you are probably aware of. One of the most prevalent discussions is probably about what to do with disposables after you use them, why isn’t everything recycled? In short it’s also a long issue of complex logistics, especially with plastic that has a very low density (weighs nothing, takes up a lot of space) and there are countless different types, but that is a whole other issue I will come back to.

Anyways, unlike most people that have done an LCA on disposables, who will often tell you that disposables are better, I beg to differ. I believe that we should still be moving away from a single-use society into one where we try to maintain the value of materials as long as possible. The way I see it, we can always work on better ways to clean things (and we really should) and improve how we produce them but when it comes to a disposable, it’s made with the sole purpose of being disposed.

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