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Look for conference, wedding, party, or holiday dinner dishes, cutlery, and napkins that are made of 100 percent recycled materials (plastic yogurt cups, paper, or glass, for instance) and are dishwasher safe so that you can reuse a lot. Then close the loop by recycling them when you're done.

Find it! Recycled dishes and flatware

Whether you're hosting a casual barbecue or a formal business meeting, we've got recycled dinnerware picks for you.

Choosing recycled dishes and flatware helps you go green because...

  • Putting old plastic and glass back to use keeps harmful manufacturing contaminants out of ecosystems, saves energy and water, and keeps disposable food service items out of landfills.

The use of disposable dinnerware is common. For big parties, picnics, and barbecues—at home or the office—using disposable dishes and cutlery is often more convenient than relying on reusable ones. But throw-away dishes create mountains of waste. Americans toss out about 25 billion polystyrene cups per year.[1] Plastic makes up 11 percent of municipal solid waste in the US (paper makes up 35 percent).[2] If their eventual resting place is in a landfill, they’ll take hundreds of years to break down.[3] One polystyrene cup has an expected lifetime of over 500 years.[4] But many petroleum-based plates, cups, and forks don't make it to the landfill—they instead end up polluting our waters and beaches. The Alguita Research Institute says that the ratio of plastic to plankton in the oceans is 6:1 and rising.[3]

Styrofoam and plastic plates, cutlery, and cups, as well as the plastic bottles we so often drink from, are made from crude oil, a non-renewable and non-biodegradable resource.[4] The production of the petrochemicals used in these products supports the hazards of the petroleum industry, which include about 2.6 million gallons of oil spilled every month during transportation and about 71 million pounds of toxins released into the air and water during refinement.[5][6]

Disposable coffee cups pose their own unique problems. A 2003 study by Starbucks found that 13.5 million reusable-cup-carrying customers kept more than 586,000 pounds of trash out of landfills in that year alone.[7]

Paper disposables are no better, since they require enormous quantities of trees to be extracted from forests. If every household in the US replaced a package of 40 paper plates with recycled options, 487,000 trees would be saved.[8]

Since some materials like glass can be recycled locally over and over indefinitely, the costs of transporting raw materials long distances for manufacturing can be reduced or eliminated as well. Recycling even plays a role in reducing emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases. Recycling programs are estimated to have kept the equivalent of 39 million car's worth of carbon out of the atmosphere in 2006, saving the equivalent of 10 billion gallons of gasoline.[9]

A key factor in the viability of recycling programs is demand for recycled products. When consumers purchase products made from recycled materials, they are not only saving valuable natural resources and energy, but are also supporting necessary markets for recycled materials.[10]

External links

Footnotes

  1. 43 Things - Reduce my impact on the environment
  2. US Energy Information Administration Kids Page - Recycling Plastics
  3. Styrophobia - Why Styrophobia?
  4. GreenBiz.com - Greening Your Take-out Packaging
  5. Plum Organics - The Seventh Generation Guide to a Toxin-Free Home
  6. University of Houston - World Internet News Cooperative: Studies Suggest Health Dangers Float Through the Air and Water in Southeast Houston
  7. Bring Your Own - The Problem
  8. IdealBite - Wanna picnic while the night sky explodes?
  9. US Environmental Protection Agency - Municipal Solid Waste Basic Facts
  10. US Environmental Protection Agency - Buying Recycled