This or that? What's better, This versus that: shower or bath, dishwashers or hand-washing, reusable or single-use straws?!

Big news! Now, That’s What I Call Green is going to become a weekly podcast! I have put the business podcast on hiatus and we will be going weekly podcasts here, but there is a twist.

‍We’ll be alternating between different styles of episode. On one week you’ll have deep dives and interviews, but on the other we’re going to be something new, and that’s what we’re doing today.

‍It’s time for This or That, where I analyse different options and reveal the most environmentally friendly option and for our first episode we are going to start off with some big topics, and you’ll have a chance to win free Incrediballs by listening.

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Transcript:

Brianne (intro): Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West, an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place without the judgment and making it fun. And of course, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our planet with. So if you are looking to navigate through everything green or not so green, you have come to the right place.

Brianne: Kia ora, welcome back. I am introducing a new segment because we are taking this pod weekly because I have moved on from the business pod. We've temporarily put that on hiatus because I've got too much to do. So every second week, instead of our interviews and our in-depth dives, we are going to have shorter snippety pod episodes. And today, it's one of my favourites. So it's called ‘This or That’. Now I'm going to break down the least impactful options for you from things you've asked me about on Instagram or Facebook or wherever. Because lots of you get confused over what is a better option. Is it paper bags or is it plastic bags? Is it showers or baths? You know, we're told all of this stuff on social and the news and so on and actually very little of it is rooted in science. A lot of it is rooted in these assumptions that actually don't have any bearing on reality. So now we're talking turkey. Never understood that saying. Turkeys can't talk. I'm sure someone will tell me where that originated.

Today we're talking about shower versus bath, dishwasher versus hand washing, and reusable versus single-use straws. But before we start, do me a favour. Jot down somewhere which one you think is going to be the winner in each category because I guarantee you, you're going to be wrong about at least one.

First up, let's get entirely too personal. Are you a shower or a bath person? I have a passionate hatred for baths and spas, actually come to think of it. They're like human soup. It's heated soups filled with skin cells and everything else that people haven't washed off themselves. They make my skin crawl. But putting that aside, which one actually has less impact on the planet? It's got to be showers, right? That is what I went in thinking when I started this research.

We've all been told it's showers. The problem with this question though, as with so many of these questions, is that there are so, so many variables. The two biggest considerations are of course water and energy use. Everybody has different shower heads with different flow rates and everyone has different bath sizes and they're all over the show. And as for energy use, some people use solar to eat their water, some people live in countries which use mostly renewable energy, and some live in countries where renewable is a much smaller percentage.

So to make this a bite-sized piece of information, I'm going to make it fairly easy. And I'm taking some pretty conservative averages. So this is largely the worst-case scenario, unless you have one of those standing-up Turkish bathtubs, which are much larger. They do look good, though. But again, human soup. Okay, so your standard bath takes between 120 to 150 litres of water to fill. And it takes, brace yourself for a little bit of physics here, it takes 4.2 joules of heat energy to heat one gram of water one degree. Now your ideal bath temperature is about 37 degrees, roughly body temperature. So heating water from your room temperature, which is say 20, 21 degrees, to that 37 degrees works out to be about 10.67 megajoules. Now converting that with some clever maths, which I 100% totally did myself, that works out to be about 2.96 kilowatt hours. And your average water heater in Aotearoa is about 2.5. So it takes about an hour to heat enough water for a bath. That was a lot of maths. I hated studying electricity at school. Really enjoyed physics, really enjoyed a whole bunch of it, electricity, not my thing.

Anyway, that math stacks up. ChatGPT told me it did. Now I read about a billion different studies on average shower time and I have come to the conclusion that the evidence is pretty watery. Sorry, I had to say it. Some studies say your average shower is 8 minutes, some say 12, some say as many as 18. That surprised me.

Honestly, I am in and out, fully washed, scrubbed, shaved within five to six minutes. I'm not rushing. I wash my hair every day. And I honestly just don't know what people are doing in there for longer. So if we start with the lowest number, again, let's be conservative, and let's say we're all having eight-minute showers.

The average shower head across Aotearoa and Australia gushes about nine litres per minute. Older ones are way worse at double that, but we're going to ignore them for now. So that is about 72 litres of water per shower. Mind blown, right? But that is still about half the bath, right? So half the water and half the energy to heat said water.

So depending on the many, many factors that I mentioned, you'd need to have about a 16 minute long shower to use the same amount of water as a bath. So yeah, shower wins. But also, some of you are having showers that are way too long. What are you, a teenage girl? Hurry it up in there.

On another somewhat disgusting note, and pardon the crassness, but you actually use more water flushing the toilet every day. Have you ever heard the phrase, if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down? Well, something to consider.

Now, one of my least favourite household chores is emptying the dishwasher. I don't know why, it's like a weird thing I've developed a block against. I don't mind doing anything else, I'm not big on cleaning, I'm not one of those people, but I do not like emptying the dishwasher. I mean, I guess I don't like hand washing either to be honest, but it is a lesser of two evils. But which one has less impact on the planet? I'm going to break it to you immediately. The dishwasher wins.

Hooray! No more hand washing. But wait, does it? I think it gets a bit grey personally this one. There is a study that said that hand washing the equivalent dishes for a family of four for a week releases 5,620 kgs of greenhouse gases. Are you sitting down? I probably should have said that before because isn't that bananas? Now obviously there is an issue with this as this comes from almost entirely from heating the water and that, as I've said earlier, varies widely. The number would be much different if it was entirely renewable for example. But in the same scenario, the dishwasher emitted about 2000 kgs of greenhouse gases. Interesting. And obviously hand washing used more than double the water. Hence why it's got higher emissions.

So clearly the dishwasher wins, right? But I don't think so. This is why I say you really need to take the studies and the LCAs you read with a bit of a grain of salt or at least read the whole thing because sometimes the assumptions that the people make aren't the assumptions that you would make. Because I found a few things odd about this study.

They stated that most people who hand wash dishes leave the tap running on hot the whole time. Who does this? That is the weirdest thing I've ever heard. You fill the sink, you wash the dishes, you might give them a quick rinse to get the bubbles off, then you let them drip dry. Or am I washing dishes wrong? Let me know. Because this study used the tap always on method, so of course it uses so much more water and therefore energy. But if you hand wash your dishes like a normal person, like I described earlier, the study admits itself that it is much more likely to be a much more environmentally friendly way of doing it.

Obviously, wash the dirtiest dishes last. You can change the sink full of water, but for the love of God, turn the tap off. Cold rinse them, let it drip dry and voila. But, of course, if you're like most people, so many of us have a dishwasher now, it's not hideous. There are two things you can do which lessen your impact with your dishwasher too. Stop pre-rinsing. I've always found people who do the pre-rinsing to be anally retentive. Sorry, I'm not sorry. And turn off the heated drying step. Both of those actually have a significant impact on how much impact your dishwasher has. So make your life easier, stop pre-rinsing and just let your dishes drip dry. Honestly, I'm flabbergasted at people who wash dishes so bizarrely.

Now we're on to straws. Now this one is super interesting and I'm super excited about people getting mad with me, like the time when I said that single-use glass was immeasurably worse than single-use plastic bottles. Anyway, if you want to go and have an argument with that, that's a couple of pods back.

So, let's get it out of the way. The worst option for all straws is the reusable option. I know, right? Who'd have thought? But as always, it comes down to human behaviour. We don't reuse straws. We just don't reuse stuff. And I know that someone out there right now is jumping up and down saying, I do, I do. Good for you. I'm genuinely proud, but you are a minority by a long shot. So I've been reading a bunch of LCAs because it turns out lots of people are actually wondering what the best kind of straw is. And interestingly, it's a closely run race between the paper and the plastic single use straw.

There's a few studies I'm referencing, but one of them has directly compared steel, glass, bamboo and silicon as its reusable options against the paper and the plastic straw. Don't forget of course silicon is technically a type of plastic. People seem to give it a pass. It's peculiar. Anyway. Now unsurprisingly the metal straw produced the highest greenhouse gas emissions followed by glass and silicon and bamboo. In terms of water use, again unsurprisingly bamboo was the absolute worst with the metal straw a distant second, silicon and glass third and fourth. Again the metal straw used the most energy to produce, which is why it produces the most greenhouse gases, followed by glass, silicon, then bamboo. Now, this factors in washing them, which is of course a significant use of energy throughout its life. And actually, one of the quickest ways you can lower their impact per straw is actually washing them every second time rather than each time you use them. So that's an option, I guess.

So out of the reusable options, I personally would go for the silicon one. But there is one glaring issue associated with all of this. This study was based on the idea of using this reusable straw five times a week, measured at one year and then five years. Who uses their straws that often? It's also worth noting, of course, that bamboo ones tend not to last for as long as they can actually grow mold. Glass ones break, we lose them. This is what I mean about the human behaviour side of things. We don't reuse them as we should do.

The reusable options had an infinitely higher impact than the single-use for those first few uses and therein lies the problem. We don't use things anywhere near enough for the higher cost to make them to be worth it. Now, both the paper and the plastic single-use straws are, for all intents and purposes, unrecyclable. Of course, the paper straw, if left uncoated, the one that goes soggy the quickest, will most likely compost if it washes out into the environment or at least breaks down if it gets into a waterway. Whereas a plastic one won't.

And we've all seen that awful turtle video, which I'm pretty sure sparked the whole anti-straw movement in the first place. Paper straws have also been found to contain more polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, which you may have heard referred to as forever chemicals, which are turning into quite a scary thing. So it's not the plastic one that contains more PFAS, it's actually the paper one, which surprised me. Oh, and the PLA straws, the bioplastics straws, they are the worst of the lot. More impact, more microplastics at the end of life. PLA, massive scam. Anyway.

So, confused? Yeah. What's the best option? Is use your lips. Unless you need to use a straw, and lots of people do for different reasons, don't use a straw. Skip it. Just drink without one. I promise you, your lipstick will be okay. And if you really, really want to use a straw, grab a silicon one I reckon. I hate using reusable straws in cafés and bars because I know that to wash them they don't stick the little brushy thing up there, they throw them in those dishwashers and unfortunately because of water tension I just don't think they're going to clean all the way through the straw. So I just forgo the straw. But the other thing to consider of course is that, like reef safe sunscreen and so many other things, straws make up a tiny fraction of plastic waste and are kind of a bit of a distraction. So avoid them for sure, but we do have bigger fish to fry.

So there you go, how many did you get right? Now I have a prize for you, drawn randomly from those who comment on my Instagram post over on Now That's What I Call Green, will win a set of Incrediballs in a few months when we launch them. All you have to do is pop a comment about which one surprised you the most or brag that you knew them all and you're in the draw. Now, see you next week because we're chatting Plastic Free July. I'm actually really excited about this because I'm talking to someone who knows an awful lot about Plastic Free July. I mean, is plastic even the enemy? I mean, probably, yeah, but it's not that black and white, as we know. Kia ora kaitiaki. See you next week.

Brianne (outro): And there you go. I hope you learned something and realised that being green isn't about everything in your pantry matching with those silly glass jars or living in a commune. If that's your jam, fabulous. But sustainability at its heart is just using what you need. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't keep it to yourself and feel free to drop me a rating and hit the subscribe button. me a rating and hit the subscribe button. Kia ora and I'll see you next week.

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