Silverware are tools of sorts that people use to eat their food. Very useful when they are actually made out of material that is sturdy enough not to break when trying to pick up a bite of mac and cheese. Silverware, as the name suggests, should be made out of some sort of metal. But for the reason of a lesser price, many people still opt to use them over metal. 

Plastic silverware, it is just simply the worst. It works mediocrely, struggling to pick up or separate anything with significant density without breaking. It is simply made to be a cheap alternative to the nice, slightly more expensive, strong, empowering metal utensils. 

The most upsetting part of the lesser utensils is that they are not environmentally friendly. Plastic silverware is almost always one-time use. This can be a big problem for our environment because the way that many people dispose of them is just by putting them in the trash or just burning them straight up. Even when people do decide to put their used plastic silverware into the recycling, cleaning it off first is not often a priority. The people working the recycling line wear gloves, but leaving last night’s dinner in your recycling only makes the process harder, and to make it all worse, they can’t even be recycled. They are seen as being too small and contaminated by the user.

While plastic silverware is not the best, I suppose that it does have its own advantages. One of these would be the lower price. With plastic silverware, you can often get a large bundle of utensils for the same or less price than a small set of metal utensils.

 With the price being the biggest advantage, the next advantage would be that they do not require as much work as you don’t have to clean or reuse them. The way that they are made is also less expensive and is more simple compared to the process of making metal utensils.

So, with all of this in mind, with the obvious awareness that plastic silverware is inferior, why would the school opt to use them instead? The truth is that our school used to use superior utensils, However, due to human and sickness-related risks, they chose to use a cheaper lower quality alternative that while being less effective, would give back to the students by reducing the risk of COVID sickness. 

The question of if we should bring the metal utensils back is an easy question. The answer is no because the cons outweigh the pros. The unhealthiness and feebleness of the plasticware. Compared to the idea of a slightly lower price, I do not understand why we started using them in the first place.