To answer your question, every day I think it’s a pleasure to eat from a ceramic plate. Even if I didn’t care about the environment, I’d prefer the aesthetic of ceramic to the flimsiness and cheap scent of paper or plastic plates.
I've tried disposable plates, even the expensive ones, and they aren't stiff enough. You have to eat at a table. You can't walk outside and eat while walking, or even sit down and balance it on your knees. They get soggy in the microwave. Cutting food on them with a sharp knife is a bad idea.
Disposable cutlery? Forget it. Flimsy, crap knives suitable only for cutting Jello. Forks whose tines snap off on anything worth stabbing. Dinky spoons make eating soup take twice as long.
I have Correlle™(?) dishes, practically unbreakable, lightweight. Not quite the same as ceramic, but good enough. Time-wise? Sometimes, such as microwaving cheesy food, I let them soak in the sink overnight. No extra time if I wash my hands at the same time. Run the dishwasher once or twice a week; loading is no slower than dumping disposables in the garbage, and unloading is five minutes tops.
The worst thing about disposables is the amount of garbage it generates. I have to drive my garbage a mile down a dirt road; that's ten minutes of inefficient driving which barely warms the engine up. I eliminate that by putting cans, jars, boxes, and as much as possible in a blue recycling bag, which the garbage service has to take by law, and have no cans to take down. I generate so little real trash that I only have to take a can and flattened boxes down to the city dump once or twice a year, and do that in combination with other trips. If I had can service, I'd be paying $10 a week and hardly ever use it.
As for machine drying, I do for bedsheets and other bulky laundry, but I like the feel of air-dried clothes and towels, and I live in a dry climate where they dry in a couple of hours, indoors. Yes, it takes more time, but no more than ten minutes once a week. Even in the winter, they dry in a few hours, and I use propane. The truck won't make it up my hill if it's wet, so I'd just as soon save the propane for heating the house and cooking.
I was hoping this was a joke. So glad the global rich can look past the waste and pollution created by plastics manufactured at plants and sent to landfills adjacent to the global poor who are lucky enough even own a dishwasher. There is a certain zen in taking care of your own shit, whether it is washing your own dishes, or hanging up your own clothes. I do both even though it would be more convenient to just buy energy and single use flatware. May your brain accumulate enough microplastics to jar into you to some sense of responsibility for your impact on this planet. Global rich indeed…
The "shortage" of landfill space is an artificial one. Similar to the housing shortage. There's plenty of land for landfills, just an unwillingness to allow them to exist.
Not the point, well, kind of. The point is that landfills, chemical plants, waste treatment etc. tend to be located near poor communities precisely because no one with any power or influence will allow them in their back yard. However, it seems ludicrous at worst, and inefficient at best to see the waste issue as simply a landfill space problem.
Yeah this is nonsense. We run the dishwasher once a day and I’d say 10 mins would be an extreme amount of time to unload it. Even if you say it takes 5 minutes to put dishes in we are talking 1 hr 45 mins a week and that is an extremely conservative estimate.
This! I don't feel anything special about eating from ceramics, but every time I eat soup from disposables I wish I had brought a nice bowl from my camping equipment.
Household of one, but doing the day’s dishes only takes about 5 minutes. If I do full meal prep for a group, 15 minutes tops. I load plates, glasses, and flatware into the dishwasher and run it once or twice per week. I’m not seeing the savings of going disposable, and that doesn’t even account for the quality differential (and maybe the externalities).
Family of 6, we use real plates and hang dry our clothes.
I don’t think using real plates is a big deal because either way you have to wash the pot/pan/wok and other cooking implements. The cutlery and plates are the easiest part. I don’t think switching to plastic would save enough time to make up for the lower quality, extra shopping, increased frequency of taking out the trash, and any feelings of distaste around contributing to somewhat unnecessary environmental degradation.
I’d like to have a dryer, but I would still hang dry my more valuable clothes. The biggest time savings come from teaching kids that wearing something for 5 mins doesn’t make it dirty.
While a first reaction is that using 100% disposables adds unnecessary to the waste stream, it wouldn’t surprise me if a fuller energy accounting found it to be more efficient than heating water to wash lots of dishes. Yet it would be good to see that discussion.
Who cares? If externalities from energy production are properly charged to producers, the cost is built into the energy. Just do whatever's cheaper counting the value of your time.
It's not your job to figure this stuff out (or mine). The more we just act on prices (as we're supposed to), the more pressure on governments to charge externalities properly.
Government? Pressure? They aren't going to react like you seem to think. If they were, we wouldn't have expensive slow dishwashers and laundry machines, we wouldn't have states requiring kids under 80 pounds ride in child seats, we wouldn't have all sorts of meddling.
I don't know. It's a fair question. I think in the longish run governments *do* eventually try to internalize externalities, but yes, it takes a really long time and in the meantime we get that sort of idiocy. As Churchill (probably didn't) say about the Americans, they can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.
I can think of two measures of government change from the founding.
One, it meddles far more than it used too in ways that are strictly useless.
Two, it has stopped meddling in a very few ways, such as the Bill of Rights and John Adams throwing newspaper editors and publishers in jail just seven years after ratifying the First Amendment.
You can just wash most of your stuff in cold water. Unless it's hot enough to put you in the hospital for putting your hands in (which a dishwasher does do, but dishwashers are also way more efficient), it's not doing much more to clean it than the cold water. M
To a German, this sounds mad. ;) 1. Well, those plates are 10 for a dollar, one set of cutlery 15 cent. Family of four: 4*15+4*10= 1 dollar per meal gone. Not unreasonable. (When living alone, I used 1plate+1spoon+1cup for the day, proper washing only end-of-day - but then one could replace this with "properly throwing away" only once a day.) Better choice in some conditions - esp. on trips. Not so sure at home. 2. Dryer: for me, it is neither the electricity nor the wear (though both are considerable! ), but the shrinking of socks/underwear/t-shirts in a dryer; I buy socks at max size and once in the dryer, I may give them to my 11 year old (he is a big-footer, too).
4. The poor of the world often use disposable stuff - banana-leaves or newspaper.
5. I got a trad-wife, she is happy enough to have machines for dishes, clothes - and we use the dryer for most clothes. (Added: you do have dirty pans and stuff anyways; our dishwasher would take days to fill up if we had no plates to add. Our everyday plates take seconds to put in/out.)
6. I do enjoy using the machines: dirty in - clean out = success! Not all work has this clear gratification. Carrying huge bags of disposed stuff to the garbage does not.
I don’t know how Bryan managed to spend 90 minutes a day (!) on line drying. Line drying my clothes takes maybe 5 minutes a week. You just throw them on a rack in a sunny part of your dwelling, then pull them off the next day. And it means your clothes will never wear out. I hardly ever buy new clothes any more because line drying makes them last forever.
How does the math work out here? How many hours are people paying to wash dishes per dish? Rinsing dishes is unnecessary, you can just stick them in the dishwasher
I dislike disposable plates for most uses. I’ll use them for something like a sandwich, but as soon as you want to be able to cut something they are awful. Plastic cutlery is always bad, as are plastic or paper cups. Metal cups are bad too, for that matter. People always give me a hard time for drinking coffee in a ceramic mug while I’m driving, but I just don’t like travel mugs.
The biggest thing though is that the plates, cups, and silverware are by far the easiest part of doing dishes. You just put them in the dishwasher. I’d be far more interested in a disposable frying pan, but that is probably not realistic.
To answer your question, every day I think it’s a pleasure to eat from a ceramic plate. Even if I didn’t care about the environment, I’d prefer the aesthetic of ceramic to the flimsiness and cheap scent of paper or plastic plates.
I've tried disposable plates, even the expensive ones, and they aren't stiff enough. You have to eat at a table. You can't walk outside and eat while walking, or even sit down and balance it on your knees. They get soggy in the microwave. Cutting food on them with a sharp knife is a bad idea.
Disposable cutlery? Forget it. Flimsy, crap knives suitable only for cutting Jello. Forks whose tines snap off on anything worth stabbing. Dinky spoons make eating soup take twice as long.
I have Correlle™(?) dishes, practically unbreakable, lightweight. Not quite the same as ceramic, but good enough. Time-wise? Sometimes, such as microwaving cheesy food, I let them soak in the sink overnight. No extra time if I wash my hands at the same time. Run the dishwasher once or twice a week; loading is no slower than dumping disposables in the garbage, and unloading is five minutes tops.
The worst thing about disposables is the amount of garbage it generates. I have to drive my garbage a mile down a dirt road; that's ten minutes of inefficient driving which barely warms the engine up. I eliminate that by putting cans, jars, boxes, and as much as possible in a blue recycling bag, which the garbage service has to take by law, and have no cans to take down. I generate so little real trash that I only have to take a can and flattened boxes down to the city dump once or twice a year, and do that in combination with other trips. If I had can service, I'd be paying $10 a week and hardly ever use it.
As for machine drying, I do for bedsheets and other bulky laundry, but I like the feel of air-dried clothes and towels, and I live in a dry climate where they dry in a couple of hours, indoors. Yes, it takes more time, but no more than ten minutes once a week. Even in the winter, they dry in a few hours, and I use propane. The truck won't make it up my hill if it's wet, so I'd just as soon save the propane for heating the house and cooking.
I feel the same way. In addition it seems Bryan overstates the cost of dish-washing, like others pointed out.
I was hoping this was a joke. So glad the global rich can look past the waste and pollution created by plastics manufactured at plants and sent to landfills adjacent to the global poor who are lucky enough even own a dishwasher. There is a certain zen in taking care of your own shit, whether it is washing your own dishes, or hanging up your own clothes. I do both even though it would be more convenient to just buy energy and single use flatware. May your brain accumulate enough microplastics to jar into you to some sense of responsibility for your impact on this planet. Global rich indeed…
Ok nerd
You are a bugman
The "shortage" of landfill space is an artificial one. Similar to the housing shortage. There's plenty of land for landfills, just an unwillingness to allow them to exist.
Not the point, well, kind of. The point is that landfills, chemical plants, waste treatment etc. tend to be located near poor communities precisely because no one with any power or influence will allow them in their back yard. However, it seems ludicrous at worst, and inefficient at best to see the waste issue as simply a landfill space problem.
It takes me about 30 seconds to wash one person's dishes. I don't see how anyone could possibly spend hours per week dish washing.
And if he organizes his family like an assembly line, he can benefit from specialization of tasks!
I purposely plan my cooking so that it all fits easily in the dishwasher each day. The process is defiantly under 10 min total burden.
But my wife uses way to many dishes and pans when she cooks, and it becomes a much bigger burden.
Yeah this is nonsense. We run the dishwasher once a day and I’d say 10 mins would be an extreme amount of time to unload it. Even if you say it takes 5 minutes to put dishes in we are talking 1 hr 45 mins a week and that is an extremely conservative estimate.
also unloading the dishwasher is ideal child labor that otherwise would be wasted with screentime.
Every time I've eaten from a disposable plate, I wished it was china.
This! I don't feel anything special about eating from ceramics, but every time I eat soup from disposables I wish I had brought a nice bowl from my camping equipment.
Household of one, but doing the day’s dishes only takes about 5 minutes. If I do full meal prep for a group, 15 minutes tops. I load plates, glasses, and flatware into the dishwasher and run it once or twice per week. I’m not seeing the savings of going disposable, and that doesn’t even account for the quality differential (and maybe the externalities).
Family of 6, we use real plates and hang dry our clothes.
I don’t think using real plates is a big deal because either way you have to wash the pot/pan/wok and other cooking implements. The cutlery and plates are the easiest part. I don’t think switching to plastic would save enough time to make up for the lower quality, extra shopping, increased frequency of taking out the trash, and any feelings of distaste around contributing to somewhat unnecessary environmental degradation.
I’d like to have a dryer, but I would still hang dry my more valuable clothes. The biggest time savings come from teaching kids that wearing something for 5 mins doesn’t make it dirty.
While a first reaction is that using 100% disposables adds unnecessary to the waste stream, it wouldn’t surprise me if a fuller energy accounting found it to be more efficient than heating water to wash lots of dishes. Yet it would be good to see that discussion.
Who cares? If externalities from energy production are properly charged to producers, the cost is built into the energy. Just do whatever's cheaper counting the value of your time.
Prices are vastly underrated by the meddlers, but unfortunately, government meddling has made them useless for that kind of calculation.
It's not your job to figure this stuff out (or mine). The more we just act on prices (as we're supposed to), the more pressure on governments to charge externalities properly.
Government? Pressure? They aren't going to react like you seem to think. If they were, we wouldn't have expensive slow dishwashers and laundry machines, we wouldn't have states requiring kids under 80 pounds ride in child seats, we wouldn't have all sorts of meddling.
I don't know. It's a fair question. I think in the longish run governments *do* eventually try to internalize externalities, but yes, it takes a really long time and in the meantime we get that sort of idiocy. As Churchill (probably didn't) say about the Americans, they can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.
I can think of two measures of government change from the founding.
One, it meddles far more than it used too in ways that are strictly useless.
Two, it has stopped meddling in a very few ways, such as the Bill of Rights and John Adams throwing newspaper editors and publishers in jail just seven years after ratifying the First Amendment.
You can just wash most of your stuff in cold water. Unless it's hot enough to put you in the hospital for putting your hands in (which a dishwasher does do, but dishwashers are also way more efficient), it's not doing much more to clean it than the cold water. M
To be honest, I try to get out of washing stuff. Like just using the same plate/bowl/fork/spoon for myself for three meals a day.
And as for clothes . . . well, I changed clothes a lot more when I was younger . . .
But I know that not some people might not like that approach!
To a German, this sounds mad. ;) 1. Well, those plates are 10 for a dollar, one set of cutlery 15 cent. Family of four: 4*15+4*10= 1 dollar per meal gone. Not unreasonable. (When living alone, I used 1plate+1spoon+1cup for the day, proper washing only end-of-day - but then one could replace this with "properly throwing away" only once a day.) Better choice in some conditions - esp. on trips. Not so sure at home. 2. Dryer: for me, it is neither the electricity nor the wear (though both are considerable! ), but the shrinking of socks/underwear/t-shirts in a dryer; I buy socks at max size and once in the dryer, I may give them to my 11 year old (he is a big-footer, too).
3. I suggest to go disposable clothes: https://www.fasswulf.de/products/texxor-pp-einweg-overall-kategorie-i?variant=50661146657094
4. The poor of the world often use disposable stuff - banana-leaves or newspaper.
5. I got a trad-wife, she is happy enough to have machines for dishes, clothes - and we use the dryer for most clothes. (Added: you do have dirty pans and stuff anyways; our dishwasher would take days to fill up if we had no plates to add. Our everyday plates take seconds to put in/out.)
6. I do enjoy using the machines: dirty in - clean out = success! Not all work has this clear gratification. Carrying huge bags of disposed stuff to the garbage does not.
I don’t know how Bryan managed to spend 90 minutes a day (!) on line drying. Line drying my clothes takes maybe 5 minutes a week. You just throw them on a rack in a sunny part of your dwelling, then pull them off the next day. And it means your clothes will never wear out. I hardly ever buy new clothes any more because line drying makes them last forever.
Is this satire?
This is dumb. Just hire a worker to do all your shit for you. Why on earth are you hand-doing household chores? lolz
A lot of people are bored and would not know how to spend an extra vacant hour.
It might be better to spend 15 mins stacking dishes rather spend 15 mins extra on YouTube shorts and reels.
How does the math work out here? How many hours are people paying to wash dishes per dish? Rinsing dishes is unnecessary, you can just stick them in the dishwasher
Dishwashers are easy to use and hanging out shirts and trousers takes no time. Nothing stops you thinking about economics while you do it.
I dislike disposable plates for most uses. I’ll use them for something like a sandwich, but as soon as you want to be able to cut something they are awful. Plastic cutlery is always bad, as are plastic or paper cups. Metal cups are bad too, for that matter. People always give me a hard time for drinking coffee in a ceramic mug while I’m driving, but I just don’t like travel mugs.
The biggest thing though is that the plates, cups, and silverware are by far the easiest part of doing dishes. You just put them in the dishwasher. I’d be far more interested in a disposable frying pan, but that is probably not realistic.