What the fork

With covid, many restaurants in and around Seattle started serving food in paper plates. To match with them, come plastic spoons, forks, knifes, straws and what not. If you cringe like me to the idea of using so much plastic per visit, here’s an idea, that I’d be glad if you copied!!

Idea: Carry a pouch to hold a small set of metal cutlery every time you go outside to eat/drink.

Now, you might wonder how I clean these cutlery after usage. In restaurants with restrooms, I clean them off with water. But, when I’m lazy and there’s a sanitizer around, I get the work done with it too. Sometimes when I’m too diligent, I might drop the utensils in the washer after getting home. I have been using this method for a year now and I don’t complain because food tastes so much better with metal spoons than with anything plastic.

Some stats to motivate you —

• 5.79 lbs of CO2 is emitted per 1.0 pound of cutlery (2.51 lbs from material production + 1.87 lbs from product production).
• An average person uses ~550 straws and approximately equivalent amount of spoons, forks, knives each per year.
• Did some math, and looks like one person could potentially reduce ~35lb of CO2 emissions per year with a single pouch!
• Now, reducing carbon footprint is one of the many more benefits. I’m purposefully not including all others to keep it simple silly :)

Let me know if you’ve tried this method or if you have other interesting ideas to share!