It's interesting how we've come full circle on disposable, single-use plastics, particularly with respect to the plastic ban reversals in the age of COVID. I am curious to see if this will lead in years to come, greater single-use items, or less.
In the short term I'd say it makes sense to me, but long term I really hope we find other solutions.
Gasoline weighs ~6 pounds a gallon. How many pounds of plastic does a moderately conscientious person place into waste streams in a month? How many miles do they drive?
I can't be certain about what happens to plastic I recycle (but it's sorted and marketed, so I think it ends up in products that use recycled plastics).
When I say it is sorted and marketed, I mean they bale up plastic by type and sell the bales. There's some possibility that the bales, which are 99% the same material, are then shipped to China and sorted for value, but not really.
And keep in mind, for most materials, and especially plastic, the recycling center pays for someone to take the material. Metals used to be a big exception, and could be used to offset the cost of recycling the other materials, but even they have greatly decreased in extractable value recently.
And even bales like you describe might need to be re-sorted for cleanliness, color, type of contaminate, or anything else. Most municipal programs are not producing "ready-to-recycle" bundles of plastic, unless it's being used solely as a filler.
With that in mind, dumping the stuff of lower value in Asia makes sense, where people can pick out individual things of value, or things that might have value after getting washed in the local river.
I've seen the baling done.
I know the person that markets their output. The recycling center gets paid for the output. If they don't get paid for something, it goes in the landfill they are located at.
Recyclable? No. The recycled plastic bag market has collapsed. The price of recycled plastic bags has dropped significantly. For many municipalities (ie: handled by "Waste Management" company), the company has decided that cleaning out plastic bags from conveyor belts is more costly than the price of recycled plastic.
Something that can survive being washed with hand soap for example should be more than good enough for most people in terms of sanitation.
(Source: I've washed dishes in 5+ commercial kitchens, though not a pizza parlor. But I've seen these machines and setups in several pizza places.)
I don't know about the "recycled soapy water" bit. All the systems I've seen use fresh water on each use. The cost of dishwashing is trivia for a restaurant compared to the refrigeration systems, so I would be somewhat surprised if there was a collection tank, plumbing and valving to recirculate water from. That seems like it would occupy a lot of room and cost a pretty penny. Have you actually seen such a set-up?
> Dishes in your home are gross in comparison
Ah, yes and no. Hot soapy water is definitely effective. But the commercial systems are meant to sanitize, not clean. There are frequently things stuck to the dishes (lettuce comes to mind) that a) don't come off in water cycles, and b) may not get hot enough, long enough to kill everything to the deep surface of the lettuce, gunk, whatever.
By comparison, the dishes at home may not get to as high a temperature but you personally have the opportunity to inspect the dish before you re-use it. In a restaurant, the food is prepped to plate or serving dish before it comes to you.
In either case, I would anticipate most any swabs of the dishes would fail to grow on culture. In fact, in some commercial kitchens, like hospitals, we do environmental cultures. So this is a fairly known thing, at least as far as the design performance of the sanitization machines go. So, gross, stuck-on lettuce, yes. Sterile, yes. If your local deli isn't using the machine as intended, not much I can say about that.
Here's an example of the kind of machine I'm talking about: https://www.hobartcorp.com/products/commercial-dishwashers/d...
It has a tank at the bottom, for the wash water. As fresh water comes in for sanitizing, some of the wash water goes down the drain -- 3/4 gal/cycle, per the brochure. We would drain the tank at the end of each day, and fill fresh in the morning.
> So, gross, stuck-on lettuce, yes. Sterile, yes.
The rule we were taught was: when it comes out of the machine, if it looks clean, it is clean. Which is to say, if there was still lettuce or other things on a dish you needed to spray them off and run it through again (and do a better job spraying before loading).
> Inside the dish machine, recycled soapy water blasts them for maybe 40 seconds, and then they are sanitized with extremely hot fresh water for maybe 20 seconds.
These two steps were a pipeline in the setup. The recycled soapy water was one "station". You pull down on a lever, and it goes up a bit later. You slide the tray to the right, pull a 2nd lever (for the 2nd station) for the very hot fresh water.
I don't know what temperature the "hot water" was, but by touch I'd describe it as "burning hot". Lots of steam, and the plates basically dried off by themselves in just minutes because it was so hot.
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Honestly, commercial dishwashing systems are significantly superior to the home stuff. If anything, my time as a professional dishwasher (as limited as it was) taught me that commercial systems care far more about sanitation than home systems.
180F, generally.
On the other hand, washing things is always resource and energy intensive. Making dishwashers better would likely make it more environmentally friendly to use disposables than wash reusables.
I was talking in context of the coronavirus, specifically plastics that are used to avoid contact with the virus. Obviously they exist, I am being hopeful that they become used.
> Furthermore, if you’ve seen how dishwashing works in your
> average pizza place, you probably wouldn’t want to put
> your lips on a multi-use plastic cup pandemic or not.
Right, but most things people are single-using are not things that touch their lips. It's going to be masks, bags, gloves, etc. If designed correctly, these can easily be multi-use.
In terms of cups, I actually quite like Germany's process of standardized glass bottles. I think glass in general is also easier to clean and worst case can be melted and re-formed.
The problem is upstream.
Why haven’t they invented good biodegradeable plastics yet?
It’s not like there is a plastics lobby telling everyone not to switch to biodegradeable plastics like there is with smart guns because of the NJ law...