oldunbeliever
Student
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2003
- Messages
- 28
The automated forum host keeps nagging me to post something, so here goes. Fire away.
It involves an interesting little puzzle I thought you guys might like to take a stab at.
The other day our local television station in one of those promotions designed to show how "green" the station is, displayed a list of "green options". One of them was "skip the paper plates and use real plates at your the next party."
I got to thinking about this. Yeah, I know, that's how you get in trouble. Too much thinking. But anyway, I thought about it and came up with this question (don't know if it's been answered here before but if so I havent seen it and I've been lurking here -- and, yes, automaton, actually posting occasionally -- for several years): Anyway, let's say we have a party for, oh, 25 to 30 people. We use plastic plates and glasses and plastic knives and forks. At the end of the party we have a two or three large bags of trash which end up eventually in a landfill where the plastic doesn't bio-degrade for a few hundred years. Agreed. That's not good.
So, OTOH, lets say we skip the plastic and use real plates and silver. The stuff has to be washed. Say three of four dishwasher loads of stuff. Maybe more. Each load uses several gallons -- maybe a lot more, I dont know -- of valuable water. The water has to be heated, whatever energy that takes, and the dirty water, full of detergent, is flushed into the sewage system where it may or may not decompose in a couple of lifetimes.
Which is worse? I really dont know, and hope somebody here does. But I am inclined to think that maybe the 3 or 4 bags of trash in the landfill are actually less environmentally damaging than the gallons of water used, the energy used to heat it, and the effluent it dumps into the ecosystem.
What say ye?
It involves an interesting little puzzle I thought you guys might like to take a stab at.
The other day our local television station in one of those promotions designed to show how "green" the station is, displayed a list of "green options". One of them was "skip the paper plates and use real plates at your the next party."
I got to thinking about this. Yeah, I know, that's how you get in trouble. Too much thinking. But anyway, I thought about it and came up with this question (don't know if it's been answered here before but if so I havent seen it and I've been lurking here -- and, yes, automaton, actually posting occasionally -- for several years): Anyway, let's say we have a party for, oh, 25 to 30 people. We use plastic plates and glasses and plastic knives and forks. At the end of the party we have a two or three large bags of trash which end up eventually in a landfill where the plastic doesn't bio-degrade for a few hundred years. Agreed. That's not good.
So, OTOH, lets say we skip the plastic and use real plates and silver. The stuff has to be washed. Say three of four dishwasher loads of stuff. Maybe more. Each load uses several gallons -- maybe a lot more, I dont know -- of valuable water. The water has to be heated, whatever energy that takes, and the dirty water, full of detergent, is flushed into the sewage system where it may or may not decompose in a couple of lifetimes.
Which is worse? I really dont know, and hope somebody here does. But I am inclined to think that maybe the 3 or 4 bags of trash in the landfill are actually less environmentally damaging than the gallons of water used, the energy used to heat it, and the effluent it dumps into the ecosystem.
What say ye?