Disposable plates and cutlery-how often do you use them?

I use paper plates all the time for "dry" food like sandwiches, hamburgers, toast, etc.  I don't have a dishwasher and I'm not washing separate dishes for every meal.  I only use plastic cups and utensils if I get it with take out or am having a party.

It really depends in our house. When we have people over for outdoor eating it is paper all the way. If I remind DH we can throw our paper food items in our organic bin for recycling most of it goes in there. For family meals we generally use regular plates. If it is just me, I will sometimes use paper. I truly despise doing dishes, like even cleaning out the dishwasher is just horrible for me.

Funny, when we do dispersed camping DH wanted real plates because he did not want to deal with the waste from using paper products. He did not want to haul that much trash around, so we got cheap plates from Aldis to take with.

I know i have seen this suggested here as a good thing to bring someone.  Nice to hear your perspective.

In my experience, people are very happy to have disposable plates and flatware in this situation. Not for the wake necessarily, but for the meals leading up to and following the service.

Where I live, wakes arent generally held at home anyway. Where Dhs family lives in TN, they are at home, but I honestly couldnt tell you what plates we used or didnt use. Neighbors and friends handled all the set up, cooking, and clean up.

We have paper plates here all the time and frequently use them. I just had a cheeseburger on one a hour ago. I think they work great for sandwiches and pizza, lots of leftovers etc. and don't see getting a plate dirty sometimes. I don't buy Styrofoam ones though and we only use disposable utensils and cups at picnics etc.

My mom was almost 84 when she passed away over 10 years ago now, and she was a rabid recycler! As a child of the Depression, she was raised to reuse things until they literally had no life left in them. Clothing and other fabrics were recycled into quilts, hot pads, doll clothes and other smaller sewn items. Food containers like ice cream buckets or margarine tubs were reused for leftovers. Once curbside recycling became a thing, anything that could be kept out of a landfill was kept out of a landfill.

To answer the question in the OP, we used paper plates a lot when we were remodeling our cabin but as a general rule now we don’t use them all that regularly. We have a dishwasher there and at home so it really isn’t a huge inconvenience to wash real dishes. We do pull them out if we’re having a lot of people over for dinner. We don’t really use plastic silverware because it generally sucks, plus now we have a ton of real silverware so we have no real need for it. I think we’ve had the same pack of Solo cups for at least ten years.

If we have a group of 6+ over for something casual, the paper plates sometimes come out. We are currently in week 5 of a kitchen reno and have been using paper plates exclusively. Don't love it, but I only have a small bathroom sink for dishes right now.

Cutlery never
Plates usually just lunch on the weekends

However, my dishwasher is currently broken and has been for about a month. We aren’t replacing it until summer, so I’ve been hand washing all dishes. We’ve been mostly eating on paper plates because of that.

The population of the U.S. is huge. I have no idea what most people do. I mostly use it for safety purposes and yes for convenience. I don't keep track, but I don't think it's excessive. I also buy my dishes from thrift stores instead. So, whatever.

We use them more than I care to admit. Our water situation is so poor that washing the dishes often stains them with a chalky type of residue. Sometimes the residue comes off, sometimes it doesn't. I would rather throw away paper plates than my fiestaware.

We are on hard well water and have invested nearly 5k to make it drinkable. We will be installing about $4k worth of equipment this weekend that will hopefully take the iron and alkaline out of the water. This water ruins our clothes, is hard on our washer/dryer, and has ruined about ten shower curtains in two years. It is the only thing I hate about this house.

Anymore - never.  We get dispoable napkins and cutlery w/ takeout sometimes, even though we say no.  That is all we use.

Even when we have parties, we use reuseable and wash it all.

I was going to say never, but then I remembered … I do keep a package of paper plates, the heavy-duty ones, and use them for things that involve melted cheese messiness. Nachos, reheating pizza. Because I really cannot deal with scraping hardened, formerly melted cheese off my plates.

But that doesn’t happen very often. I even kind of forgot they were there.

I think of them as a party supply, not an everyday grocery item.