So what is the best replacement for fast food and takeaway purposes? Bamboo cutlery?
Fast food: metal cutlery at the restaurant that gets washed and reused.
Take away: your own cutlery at home.
https://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Pen-Shape-Stainless-Folding-...
https://www.amazon.com/Tableware-Camping-Tools-Portable-Mult...
I've heard it's not unusual in some places for people to do this with chopsticks.
https://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Stainless-Folding-Chopsticks...
Maybe eat food that does not require cutlery ?
Part of reducing environmental damage is changing everyone's behaviour, and maybe considering eating in the car not being a good thing for several reasons, one of which is environmental impact.
Even if it was plastic: at least you'd get a chance to say no. Of all the single use food utensils handed over counters, a considerable fraction isn't even wanted by the customer and only accepted because denying would be extra effort for both sides.
I've said it before, and I've said it again: these anti-plastic laws are actively hostile to people with disabilities.
However, keep in mind this is a small fraction of people and does not justify single-use plastics. There's more discussion of alternative materials in other branches of this post.
A) Figuring out how to deal with the external effects of single-use plastic for 500+ million people
or
B) Asking a very small fraction of those 500+ million people with motor control issues who also use single use plastic to use alternatives, of which there are many - including paper, bamboo, and regular cutlery
Eating involves fine manipulation of the cutlery to load it with food, and then hitting a relatively small target surrounded by things that you really don't want to, say, stab with a fork if you miss that target.
I'd have expected that if one has good enough motor control for that, washing cutlery in the sink or a dishwasher would not be a problem, as all the movements required for washing seem to require less accuracy and consistency than do those for eating with the cutlery.
So, clearly, I'm missing something about the mechanics of motor control. Is it because almost all movements involve several different muscles, and so that if one has different levels of control issue with different one that you can get some movements are impossible even though they don't require much precision, and others are possible, even with tight constraints, because even though they involve the same body parts, they differ in the contribution required of each muscle?
Of course, it could be as simple as just saying that you have to feed yourself, but you don't have to do the dishes. Someone might be able to do 10 things a day, but not 20.
A lot of these comments just remind me of a roomie I had in uni would would come up with endless reasons why he never owned a single reusable piece of dishware. It's suddenly about hygiene and... do you even know how many people die in $country cuz they can't just throw their plates away?! And the time savings! He must save hours each day actually if you do the math. And are you sure using so much water to clean a plate is any eco-friendlier than the plastic he just tossed after eating that sandwich? Oh yeah, and disabled people! How would he clean a plate if he had no hands? Or if he was just a disembodied head whose only form of locomotion was to be tossed around like a volleyball. What then, huh??
But at this point you indulge him just to see if he'll even admit that he's just not willing to spend 5 seconds rinsing a plate after use. And any time he does use one of the communal reusable dishes, it'll collect mold in the sink until someone else washes it for him.
There is a tendency nowadays to be more concerned with dirt and germs than is biologically justified (possibly to our detriment in some cases--some researchers think that the rise in prevalence of allergies and asthma in children is due to insufficient exposure to things that can help train their immune systems since we are stopping those things before they get that far).
Soup kitchens typically have worse food quality than fast food places, plus you typically wait in line for an hour or more next to other very poor people (often, but not always, also homeless). They frequently smell of cigarette smoke and/or marijuana smoke and are often in quite poor health, exposing you to a concentration of germs.
Soup kitchens have a tendency to be a horrifying concentration of poverty that makes it quite difficult to avoid ending up sick. It didn't take long on the the street for me to decide that I would rather not eat for short stints than to go to most soup kitchens.
It's also not uncommon for people who are handicapped, elderly or otherwise have personal challenges and personal burdens to rely heavily on take out. It's cheaper than eating in the restaurant because you can supply your own drinks, buy two meals and split it between three people in the privacy of your home and you don't necessarily have to tip. (I realize tipping is not a thing in some places, but you can get take out from places where it is a thing.)
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medieval-diseases...
Some homeless people are living in their car, attending school or have a job, etc. It is not uncommon for homeless people to be actively trying to fit in and not be noticed as homeless.
Most people did not think I was homeless upon meeting me. They only figured it out by seeing me repeatedly and realizing I wore the same clothes for two weeks or more and had "homeless habits" of various sorts.
Even if you are not loathe to admit in line that you are homeless and entitled to the exception, how to you prove you are homeless?
Proving a lack of a home winds up being a real issue for homeless people seeking services. The lack of something is often inherently hard to prove.
Sometimes homeless people are told they can only access services if they are registered with one of the homeless services in town as proof of their lack of housing. This winds up being a serious barrier to accessing services.
Now I need my registered homeless card to get my take out in disposable containers? And then simply having the containers signals to everyone who sees me that I'm probably homeless because that is on a short list of exemptions that entitle you to disposable containers?
Let's just start tattooing blue lines across the foreheads of all homeless people to make sure they are branded for life. It would be vastly simpler than our current methodologies for politely painting them into a corner at every turn. (<-- sarcasm, obviously)
Have a significant surcharge for disposable, then if people present their WIC/SNAP they get a waiver at checkout.
That's how they currently handle the bag ban: People with SNAP can get free bags. I had lost my food stamps due to bureaucratic error by the time the ban was instituted. I tried to reapply and someone dropped the ball again. Meanwhile, the process of applying was such a hardship that I decided to not bother to try again.
I probably still qualify for food stamps and still don't have them.
There are lots of people who fall through the cracks for various reasons. I also don't qualify for disability. Simply having a genetic disorder does not automatically qualify you for disability. You have to prove you are impaired to a certain degree.
I can't prove that. I'm too good at taking care of myself, though it takes all my time and requires substantial accommodation, a thing that absolutely does not result in the world going "Awwww. She totes should get a break of some kind. Let's cut the poor girl some slack and give her an exception/do a fundraiser/ support her goddamned Patreon."
No, it's fuck me all the way down. And I'm hardly some rare exception. That seems to be par for the course for homeless people.
Anyway, the reality is that privileged people tend to get exceptions to all the rules because they are the right color, the right gender, have enough money, etc. You will notice that the bag ban in no way impedes rich people from having all the bags they want. They just need to pay 10 cents apiece, which isn't remotely a hardship for them. There is no cap on how many they can use (for example).
Similarly, during water rationing during the drought in California, I saw articles that indicated that very rich people, like Oprah Winfrey, simply trucked in however much water they wanted for their swimming pools, landscaping and what not.
It's always the poor people who are hurt the most by all such rules. Other people have myriad ways they can get around them, usually without being stigmatized, penalized, prosecuted, etc.
For mugs and cups there is Isla packaging from Kotkamills.
Solutions exist, plastic for consumer single use stuff is just plain stupid.