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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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I loathe plastic waste, but here's a conundrum I read about.
Elementary school kids learned about environmentalism, wanted to do better. They got the school to dump plastic utensils and plates in favor of steel. No brainer, right?
Turns out the energy cost for making the steel meant they would have to wash those items 1,000+ times to make up for the plastic energy production. Still, no brainer, right?
Then they added in the energy costs for washing those items 1,000+ times. Not remotely worth doing. (Factor in loss, it's even worse.)
We got ourselves in a hella mess. Getting off plastic is going to mean cheap, clean and abundant energy. I mean shitloads of power. I'm all in for nuclear, at least as a stopgap.
The primary concern with single-use plastics is not energy consumption but plastic waste. That, of course raises the question of how to weigh one kind of environmental harm against another, and I do not have a good answer.
My instinct here is that not generating so much trash is the energy use in this case, but I can't prove that.
It's a balancing act for sure. You have to understand what's good for the climate isnt necessarily good for the environment. However I believe we have to understand that cleaning up the plastic in the world is imho harder than recapturing co2 since you can't just build a big machine wherever you want and it does it's job. Plastic you have to hunt down manually, and good luck doing that for micro plastics
But I don't think your example works as well as eg plastic Vs glas bottles. Your energy dilemma can be solved simply by having photovoltaic panels and/or hooking the dishwasher up to a renewably generated hot water supply.
Also even in your calculations which I assume are not optimised 2000+ wash cycles is only like 6 years of use. And I still think that's a no brainer.