[Market Economy Guide] Is Using Disposable Products a Sin?

“The disposable cup refund system had good intentions, but it failed.

Using washed reusable tableware can require more resources and time.”

Environmentalists strongly dislike disposable products. To them, disposables are a symbol of how human laziness destroys the environment. If environmentalists alone refused to use disposable products, there would be little reason for concern. But environmentalists demand rules that prevent other people from using them as well.

Government and environmentalists’ coercion

When those demands were accepted, the government introduced a refundable deposit system for disposable cups in the early 2000s. The idea was to reduce the use of disposable items by adding a deposit charge to transactions involving cups, plastic bags, shopping bags, and the like. In short, the thinking was that if using disposable products were made inconvenient, people would naturally use fewer of them.

But the disposable cup deposit regulation was not successful. Since the government strongly pushed it, frontline businesses had little choice but to participate, so the participation rate itself was high. Yet the actual use of disposable cups did not decline at all. From the businesses’ point of view, it created the awkward situation of imposing needless inconvenience on valued customers who generated their sales. From consumers’ standpoint, the cup deposit effectively became money thrown away.

When pursuing reform or introducing a new system, it must make human life more convenient and valuable than before if it is to be sustainable. The disposable cup deposit regulation instead made people’s lives more inconvenient. The very idea of trying to achieve some noble goal by making people uncomfortable was flawed from the start. In the end, in 2008 the government abolished the disposable cup deposit system, which had drawn widespread complaints from both consumers and businesses.

Would using washable tableware instead of disposables protect the environment?

The perception that using disposable products is harmful to the environment is, surprisingly, greatly exaggerated. Consider the situation of eating at a restaurant. Would the environment really be better protected by using regular tableware instead of disposable tableware? In reality, not necessarily. To maintain hygiene with regular tableware, it must be thoroughly washed every time before reuse. Naturally, the water, detergent, and electricity used in washing consume resources and pollute the environment. There is no evidence anywhere that this is environmentally better than the pollution caused by using disposable products and then incinerating them.

By contrast, disposable tableware has a clear advantage over regular tableware in terms of hygiene. Food hygiene, which may be hard to guarantee when reusing washed tableware, is clearly ensured when disposable tableware is used. This is exactly why many items in the medical field, where strict hygiene is required, are disposable. For example, most surgical supplies are disposable items that are discarded immediately after use. Surgical gloves, adhesive bandages, bandages, and syringes all fall into this category. Most disposable products we see around us are used because of hygiene needs in food service, medicine, and other areas—not because human beings are lazy, as some environmentalists claim.

The claim that human laziness ruins the environment starts from undervaluing the worth of human time. But for busy modern people, there is no resource more precious than time. And using limited time for more valuable purposes is precisely how to prevent waste of the resources allocated to human beings. Depending on the person and the situation, there may easily be tasks more valuable than washing dishes. Think of a student busy preparing for final exams. For that student, it is more desirable to use a paper cup and invest the time saved from washing cups into studying. The same is true for an office worker overwhelmed with writing a month-end report.

We must not sanctify the environment

For most modern people, using the time saved by disposable products to invest in their own tasks is a more valuable use of time. Environmentalists, having excessively sanctified the value of nature and the environment, fail to recognize the value of the limited time given to human beings. They take away the freedom of individual economic actors to judge and choose for themselves between disposable and reusable products.

Even if, for the sake of argument, reusable goods were superior for environmental protection, that still would not prove that disposable products should not be used. All human activity, whatever its form, pollutes the environment to some degree.

Thinking that sanctifies the environment can easily lead to an environmental fundamentalism that denies all human activity. As long as pollution remains within the range that human capability can manage, it is right to allow it—whether that means the use of disposable products or anything else.

◆ Please remember

Would the environment really be better protected by using regular tableware instead of disposable tableware? In reality, not necessarily. To maintain hygiene with regular tableware, it must be thoroughly washed every time before reuse. Naturally, the water, detergent, and electricity used in washing consume resources and pollute the environment.

Sung-no Choi, President of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: [시장경제 길라잡이] 일회용품 사용은 죄악인가

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2019-08-19

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=12&idx=20442