You are being incredibly judgemental about people you don't even know.

yes, but if trying not to be wasteful creates an anxiety, then you need to treat the anxiety first. in that case giving yourself permission to be wasteful is what matters, and responding to that by telling to person not to be wasteful is counterproductive.

Speaking of wastefulness and dishwashers, I rent an apartment which does not include a dishwasher. In fact, no apartment I've ever rented included a dishwasher, although many have included a clothes washer and dryer installed.

My kitchen does include a garbage disposal, which is a nuisance, because even though my ex-girlfriend called it "dispose-all", it disposes of nothing, except it effectively annoys 10-30 neighbor families if you manage to clog up the lateral drainpipes, and I don't rely on it to chew up food or any solid waste at all. The only reason I activate it is because it speeds up the draining of water in the dual sink. And also because, if I don't run it on a weekly basis, the motor will seize up in a way that requires a maintenance call, and you don't want to call in maintenance.

Anyway, I wash my dishes by hand, and the bane of my existence is dirty dishes in the kitchen sink when I'm quite hungry and it's 7am and I just want to get breakfast started, but the sink isn't clear and everything I need is dirty, and needs soaking time before the residue will budge, and so I end up punting and ordering delivery anyway.

Washing dishes is a pipeline, a process, that can take 2 hours, or it can last 12 hours, or it can take 3 days to complete. I often don't get around to that magnificent endgame of putting away the dishes but I leave them in the drying-rack until I need them again. It's like my "L2 Cache" for kitchenware, that drying rack. And guess what, when I go to wash dishes again, I often discover there's no room in the rack, and I rip out my hair a little bit and I stop washing the dishes long enough to empty the rack, and then I'm exhausted and I go to lie down in bed instead of washing dishes, or starting dinner, and guess who's ordering delivery again?

So one of the sanity-preserving hacks I've developed is using paper plates, paper bowls, plastic cold cups, and plastic flatware. And this works great for cold cereal, and the raw eggs I drink, and microwaved frozen meals that I can plop into a bowl or put on a plate in order to cut them into pieces.

And I thought that cloth napkins and dish towels were cool, because I was Saving the Earth, and for a couple of years I owned not a single roll of paper towels; I used cloth napkins and I laundered them, and now I use both, and if something is going to stain my precious cloth, then I use paper towels or a disposable sponge on it first.

And they called me "wasteful" for using disposable kitchenware, but in reality I only own a single tablepspoon and a single teaspoon. I own about 3 forks, and 2 butter knives. I recently purchased a set of 4 identical steak knives, because a good sharp knife to cut meats is essential. But most of my flatware is disposable, including semi-disposable chopsticks (set of 8 for about $4).

And guess what? None of the delivery services include plasticware anymore. None of the restaurants tuck it into your bag. They used to give you, like, a packaged knife-fork-spoon-napkin-salt-pepper, sealed in cellophane. Then COVID-19 happened, and plasticware is a cost center, and restaurants hate delivery services for many reasons, and no restaurant carries knives, even plastic butter knives. They are still usually sending me plastic straws, but I nevertheless keep on hand a stock of plastic bendy-straws to use with every beverage.

So basically whether I order delivery or I make food at home, my plasticware suffices, and yeah, it's wasteful and I do not wash or rinse or reuse any of them, and I don't really care, because it is a sanity-preserving strategy that works quite well, because it is much easier to just tuck into a meal when I have flatware ready to use.