I think this is the sort of advice that sounds efficient and clever but really isn’t.
Members of my family (of three) spend maybe thirty seconds per meal transferring plates and cutlery to the dishwasher, and I guess the same amount of time getting them out of the dishwasher and into where they are stored. Throwing them away would take maybe 20s per meal. So using not-disposable stuff costs us 40 person-seconds per meal, two meals a day, plus a bit for breakfast (but that, when we bother at all, uses less cutlery and crockery), for let’s say 90 seconds a day or 2700 seconds a month. That’s 45 minutes per month, versus (taking your figure as correct) $30/month for disposable stuff.
Assuming for the moment that this is the only consideration, using disposable stuff is better if whoever’s doing the clearing away could use that time to earn money at an after-tax rate of $30 per 45 minutes or $40 per hour. I can, but my wife and teenage daughter can’t and they do just as much table-cleaning and dishwasher-emptying as I do. Further, I am on a salary rather than an hourly wage, and spending an extra 45 minutes per month at work is unlikely to make much difference to my prospects of promotion, bonuses, getting fired, etc.
“Real” cutlery and crockery are much, much nicer to use than disposable. (Disposable plates are almost all too small. Disposable knives don’t cut. Disposable plastic forks have bendy tines. Disposable wooden forks have super-blunt tines and cost more. Disposable cutlery of any sort is liable to break. Disposable cutlery of any sort is less comfortable on the hands.)
And there are externalities. Disposable plastic products are made using oil, which is a somewhat scarce resource. I’m pretty sure making them consumes more energy (much of it made by burning fossil fuels—scarce resource and bad for the environment and for people’s health) than cleaning them. They probably end up in landfill, which also isn’t great for the environment.
Oh, and while we’re adding up the seconds of time it takes to do these things, if we used disposable cutlery and crockery we would need to empty the garbage more often, which also takes time and is a more unpleasant job than loading the dishwasher.
Shrug. Many of the things you mentioned don’t bother me. Maybe overall what you say is true for a well functioning household. Dishes are often cited as one of the top sources of fights between couples though.
I think there’s a worthwhile distinction between “thing that couples fight about” and “thing that causes couples to fight more”. In general, something in one of those categories will be in the other, but how strongly a thing is in one isn’t a great guide to how strongly it’s in the other. My guess is that if people are having big arguments about dishes then it’s probably more symptom than cause. (And if they’re just occasionally getting annoyed about dishes, it probably doesn’t matter much.)
I should add that, although there are a bunch of numbers in my comment above, I haven’t actually done a time-and-motion study and figured out exact timings, and my estimates absolutely could be wrong. For me they’d have to be a long way out before it became worth switching from “permanent” to disposable eating-tools.
(Another factor that might be relevant to the decision: maybe the amount and type of storage you need in your kitchen or, if you have and use one, your dining room, is different in the two cases. E.g., if you get disposable things in plastic wrappers, maybe you just leave them sat on the kitchen table all the time, whereas if you have china plates and steel cutlery you probably keep it in cupboards and drawers. That could have implications in cost, convenience, clutter, etc.
[EDITED to add:] Point taken about “well functioning household”; more broadly, the right tradeoffs can change a lot if e.g. some or all of the people in the house suffer from depression or other things that mess with motivation, or have much worse than average mobility, or hate dish-washing / dishwasher-loading a great deal, etc. I certainly don’t want to claim that no one would do well to use disposable cutlery and crockery. I’m just not convinced by any general claim that most people, most LW readers, most prosperous people in the US, etc., would have better lives overall if they used disposables.
I think this is the sort of advice that sounds efficient and clever but really isn’t.
Members of my family (of three) spend maybe thirty seconds per meal transferring plates and cutlery to the dishwasher, and I guess the same amount of time getting them out of the dishwasher and into where they are stored. Throwing them away would take maybe 20s per meal. So using not-disposable stuff costs us 40 person-seconds per meal, two meals a day, plus a bit for breakfast (but that, when we bother at all, uses less cutlery and crockery), for let’s say 90 seconds a day or 2700 seconds a month. That’s 45 minutes per month, versus (taking your figure as correct) $30/month for disposable stuff.
Assuming for the moment that this is the only consideration, using disposable stuff is better if whoever’s doing the clearing away could use that time to earn money at an after-tax rate of $30 per 45 minutes or $40 per hour. I can, but my wife and teenage daughter can’t and they do just as much table-cleaning and dishwasher-emptying as I do. Further, I am on a salary rather than an hourly wage, and spending an extra 45 minutes per month at work is unlikely to make much difference to my prospects of promotion, bonuses, getting fired, etc.
“Real” cutlery and crockery are much, much nicer to use than disposable. (Disposable plates are almost all too small. Disposable knives don’t cut. Disposable plastic forks have bendy tines. Disposable wooden forks have super-blunt tines and cost more. Disposable cutlery of any sort is liable to break. Disposable cutlery of any sort is less comfortable on the hands.)
And there are externalities. Disposable plastic products are made using oil, which is a somewhat scarce resource. I’m pretty sure making them consumes more energy (much of it made by burning fossil fuels—scarce resource and bad for the environment and for people’s health) than cleaning them. They probably end up in landfill, which also isn’t great for the environment.
Oh, and while we’re adding up the seconds of time it takes to do these things, if we used disposable cutlery and crockery we would need to empty the garbage more often, which also takes time and is a more unpleasant job than loading the dishwasher.
Hm, that also makes sense. I think I overestimated how much time I spend doing those kinds of dishes versus doing “pots and pans” dishes.
Shrug. Many of the things you mentioned don’t bother me. Maybe overall what you say is true for a well functioning household. Dishes are often cited as one of the top sources of fights between couples though.
I think there’s a worthwhile distinction between “thing that couples fight about” and “thing that causes couples to fight more”. In general, something in one of those categories will be in the other, but how strongly a thing is in one isn’t a great guide to how strongly it’s in the other. My guess is that if people are having big arguments about dishes then it’s probably more symptom than cause. (And if they’re just occasionally getting annoyed about dishes, it probably doesn’t matter much.)
I should add that, although there are a bunch of numbers in my comment above, I haven’t actually done a time-and-motion study and figured out exact timings, and my estimates absolutely could be wrong. For me they’d have to be a long way out before it became worth switching from “permanent” to disposable eating-tools.
(Another factor that might be relevant to the decision: maybe the amount and type of storage you need in your kitchen or, if you have and use one, your dining room, is different in the two cases. E.g., if you get disposable things in plastic wrappers, maybe you just leave them sat on the kitchen table all the time, whereas if you have china plates and steel cutlery you probably keep it in cupboards and drawers. That could have implications in cost, convenience, clutter, etc.
[EDITED to add:] Point taken about “well functioning household”; more broadly, the right tradeoffs can change a lot if e.g. some or all of the people in the house suffer from depression or other things that mess with motivation, or have much worse than average mobility, or hate dish-washing / dishwasher-loading a great deal, etc. I certainly don’t want to claim that no one would do well to use disposable cutlery and crockery. I’m just not convinced by any general claim that most people, most LW readers, most prosperous people in the US, etc., would have better lives overall if they used disposables.
They would do better to solve that problem than have a substandard dining experience dripping on them every day.