Reusable food and drinkware system for Hilo in the works

[terracore]

Quick, before this thread goes off the rails....  

I'm not the conductor of this crazy train, but this grant doesn't make any sense to me:

"Research shows that switching half of Hilo’s disposable foodware to reusables would lead to a reduction of 500 tons of solid waste annually and more than 3,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions."

I'd like to see this research.  One of the stumbling blocks of reducing greenhouse gases in this manner is it can take more energy to wash and sanitize dishes than creating disposable ones.  This is why they stopped refilling glass bottles back in the 1970s. The solid waste issue can be solved by requiring compostable materials, which I thought was already a thing (?).

My second question has to do with why "sea grant"?  Virtually all the plastic in the oceans comes from Asia.  Ours goes into a landfill, and I don't see anything that mentions stopping the ocean plastic at the source.  So I looked up sea grant at https://seagrant.soest.hawaii.edu/ and this is what it says:

"...As an organization of 45 faculty and staff at the University of Hawaiʻi, Hawaiʻi Sea Grant has contributed to the persistence of societal inequities due to systemic racism and colonialism."

That didn't clear anything up.

Regardless, I hope the program is a success.  Maybe it's the pessimism in me, but I'm reminded of the time that Portland tried to mimic the Dutch bicycle program, where some communities provide free bicycles for people to use. Just grab one of the free bikes from the rack, ride it, and return it or leave at another rack for the next person to use.  If I recall correctly, Portland made the free bikes a distinctive yellow color.  But they all disappeared.  They weren't repainted and sold, they just vanished.  It was widely believed at the time that they were all thrown into the Willamette River.  Just because.