The Ease of Waste

My senior year of undergrad, I would go to the restaurant in my dorm building and order food and the question that was always asked first was “for here or to go”. Whether or not I was eating there, I would always default to ordering “to go” because in my mind I had the chance to take it home if I didn’t eat all of it and could just throw it away in the worst case scenario.

As the weeks piled up, so too did my pile of rubbish. I looked at it and started thinking about how much trash I generate in a typical year. Here are a few scenarios:

  • Go to a party and pick up a drink and put a drink in it. You forget about it and get a new one for every drink you get.
  • Go to a restaurant and get a single-use plastic cup for a small amount of water
  • Get a cup of coffee and throw away the container
  • Use single-use plastic utensils

These were things I would do constantly and the pile of rubbish constantly grew and grew. I just thought of it as a normal way of things until that day I really took a look at my pile and wondered how large it would be if I let it pile up throughout the year. After some deep thought, I realized it could possibly be the size of my room at the rate I was going. I thought about all of the things that made up the pile and realized it would actually be extremely easy to cut back on just about everything there.

For my last year of school I changed a few things:

  • I got an insulated bottle for my tea instead of getting a new cup.
  • I carried my water bottle EVERYWHERE. It stayed put in my backpack.
  • Took a fork from that dining place and just used it for food in my room instead of getting a disposable one every time
  • Use the same cup for drinks the whole evening

I carried these changes with me post graduation but once I got into an office environment, noticing the waste got to me. In our breakroom there were cups available for use with the coffee dispenser and disposable utensils and plates available at any employee’s discretion. Even worse, our cafeteria had reusable dishware but the vast majority of people would get the disposable. Whenever I’d ask anyone why they used a disposable instead of a reusable they’d say it was “in case they wanted to take it home”. The thing is that you could decide that later and then put it in a to-go box, but that was never truly considered. I could tell that most people didn’t take these home by the massive stacks of disposable containers in the disposable bins. It more often than not was overflowing towards the end of the lunch rush. There were always workers who looked like they were working overtime to empty these bins.

The company always liked to claim there were green initiatives and was often proud of the fact that the disposable containers were “compostable”. Compostable or not, waste is never a positive. People often forgot that there’s a specific order to “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” for a reason. Reducing waste is the most important and reusing what you have is second best. Putting something in a recycling box doesn’t make it magically appear as another product. Energy goes into recycling products if they’re even recycled at all and not just sent into a landfill. The compostable dishware and utensils were sent offsite because they had to go to a specific facility for composting. The logistics of sending it away creates its own waste. Both with transportation of the items and the energy it would take to actually compost everything.

I realized the reason most people did this was the same reason I was doing it earlier on. It’s EXTREMELY easy to just take a disposable item and throw it away. Especially when it’s free and you don’t see or pay for the costs of the disposal directly. It’s easy for companies to just offer disposable items because they almost never pay for a per volume or per weight disposal fee. Usually one flat fee covers it all and there’s no reason to be particularly worried when that’s the case. I contacted the green/environmental department where I worked with some suggestions on how to alleviate this issue, but I kind of knew full well they would not be particularly palatable.

People in Amsterdam likely don’t ride bikes to work to prevent congestion and people in New York don’t take the subway because it’s far more efficient per person than driving. They do it because it is the easiest way to do things where they are. People like to do what’s easiest and most convenient. If you were to make it easier to choose the reusable option (or maybe harder to choose the disposable option) more people would use the reusable option. In my proposals I suggested:

  • Giving people who use reusable dishes/utensils a discount
  • Charging people for disposables
  • Advertise the reusable options more. I noticed everyone taking food to their desk would take a to-go/disposable plate because they didn’t realize there were collection bins in the kitchens
  • Have a reusable to go option with some way of ensuring that people bring back containers. A school nearby mine actually did something like this using a token system

The options above are somewhat easily implemented in the relatively closed office/school environment but are somewhat harder to implement in a simple way across a municipality. Things like Durham, North Carolina’s GreenToGo scheme are amazing and a great step towards the goal of reducing waste, but there are ways to go to scale it up to ensure a less wasteful tomorrow, such as making it easier to drop off containers.

It would be great if we could have something that makes it trivial to not be wasteful, but in the near term we’re in a position where the only thing we can do is try to get people to waste less on their own, but with how easy it is to dispose of things now, it’s a pretty uphill battle…especially when the alternatives makes people’s lives slightly more inconvenient. I’ve had to pressure my friends to get them to stop using the disposable containers. It’s very hit or miss, but I won’t stop doing it any time soon.