Globally, billions of plastic forks, knives, spoons, bowls, plates and trays are produced each year to fuel the take-away food industry and stock hotels, hospitals and school catering systems. This report is a meta-analysis of six Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies to understand the environmental performance of single-use tableware and their alternatives.
This report summarises current knowledge about the environmental performance of single-use plastic tableware and its alternatives and offers guidelines to policy makers tasked with regulating its use. It is a meta-analysis of six Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies that are grouped in two distinct clusters: LCA studies comparing single-use tableware and LCA studies comparing single-use and reusable tableware. These studies and their key findings are summarised in the table at the end of this section.
The analysis demonstrates that while there are multiple variables that affect the environmental impacts of both single-use and reusable tableware – including materials used in their production and end-of-life treatment – reusable tableware consistently outperforms single-use tableware in all the studies and across all environmental impact categories (with water use being the exception, because of washing).