At most places Melissa Valliant goes when dining out, she carries in her backpack a set of reusable flatware — prepared to refuse the disposable utensils she says are part of the plastic pollution crisis that’s inextricably linked with the climate crisis.
Plastic is made from chemicals derived from fossil fuels, the burning of which drive the climate crisis by producing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane. Disposable flatware, in particular, is typically produced from a rigid plastic called polystyrene, which is made from a byproduct of petroleum.
“Plastic is contributing to climate change at every stage of its life cycle,” said Valliant, communications director at Beyond Plastics, a nationwide project that works to end plastic pollution and is based at Bennington College in Vermont.
“Plastic production, specifically, is warming the planet four times faster than air travel,” Valliant said. “In addition to its climate impact, it’s also contributing to air and water pollution during the drilling and fracking process and toxic emissions that come out of the plastic production plant.”
Additionally, the life cycle of plastics contributes to environmental injustice, as plastics tend to be both manufactured and disposed of in lower-income communities and communities of color, Valliant said. The resulting pollutants have led to a higher rate of cancer in those areas.
Processing crude oil also requires a significant amount of energy, Dr. Jillian Goldfarb, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University in New York state, said via email. “A typical refinery will use about 1.5 barrels of water for each barrel of oil it processes,” Goldfarb, a fellow of the American Chemical Society, said.
The impact of opting for reusable flatware
Some reports estimate that potentially between 36 billion and 40 billion plastic utensils are used every year just in the United States, which is more than 100 million per day, Valliant said.
You might think recycling plastic flatware may offset the harms of using it. But as of 2018, only 9% of all the plastic the world has ever produced — around 9 billion metric tons or nearly 10 billion US tons — had been recycled, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme.
This means most of the rest ends up in landfills, and the intentional durability of plastics means “the fork you (ate) lunch with today could be taking up space in a landfill for the next 500 years,” Goldfarb said.
“In landfills, plastic utensils are weakened by mechanical forces like the friction of moving and being compressed among literally tons of trash, as well as biological and chemical means, like the bacteria present in landfills and corrosive chemicals,” Goldfarb said. “While this does little to degrade the utensils in a meaningful time frame, it does lead to the release of more microplastics, which can travel with leachate and can eventually contaminate groundwater supplies.”
What isn’t recycled or thrown away is burned or littered, experts said. Burning plastic utensils releases carbon dioxide into the environment, Goldfarb said, and an incinerator that isn’t at peak performance can release particulate matter and carbon monoxide.
However, emissions of these pollutants from burning are typically low when compared with those from landfills, according to reports by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The agency monitors air emissions and has standards for pollutants, Goldfarb said.
The production process for plastics has a significantly worse impact on the environment than individuals’ use of them does, which is “just another reason why waste management solutions for single-use plastic and plastic in general are not going to significantly curb this crisis,” Valliant said. “We actually need to stop pollution at the source, which means cutting back on the production and use of plastic from the get-go.”
To limit your use of plastic flatware, you could switch to compostable, bamboo or metal options, all of which generally require or produce significantly less energy, water, waste or emissions, Goldfarb said. Producing a pound of bamboo forks, for example, expends 0.46 kilowatts per hour, whereas making a pound of plastic forks expends 11 kilowatts per hour, according to Goldfarb. (Manufacturing metal utensils, however, does require more water than plastic utensils.)
But you don’t have to buy a reusable set from a trendy environmental store — you can just use what you already have, Valliant said. And if a plastic fork weighs about 5 grams, our landfills would be spared roughly 200,000 tons of single-use plastic utensils, “a weight equivalent to 889 Statues of Liberty,” Valliant added.
To put into perspective the savings on electricity use, Goldfarb said, switching from plastic forks to metal “could save enough energy to charge your iPhone once a day for five years.”
“In the sea of plastic waste we create each year, one person switching to reusable silverware is unlikely to alter the global environmental impacts of plastic utensils on a climate-mitigation scale,” Goldfarb said. “Yet this person’s action — if shared and discussed with others — can form the basis for a community of change.
“Across the country, states and municipalities are banning single-use plastics (including utensils) in growing numbers,” Goldfarb added. “These collective actions could have very meaningful impacts.”
Additionally, by reducing your share of plastic waste and its impact on pollution and the climate crisis, you would also be lowering the odds of microplastics residing in your body, experts said — a phenomenon increasingly detected by recent research. Studies have found microplastics in human blood, lungs, placentas, brains and testicles.
“This is really concerning, because a lot of these chemicals are associated with cancer, hormone disruption, diabetes, fertility issues — the more we learn, the scarier it gets,” Valliant said. “We should be reducing our exposure to it, which is why it’s so important for policymakers to force companies to do so.”
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