Good People is a bi-monthly column highlighting McGill students doing community-oriented work on and around campus. Because it’s important to celebrate good people doing good things.
Single-use products have a significant environmental cost. Reusable products are therefore more sustainable than single-use items in any form. Since 2007, The Plate Club, run out of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), has been championing reusable products. The service provides free reusable dishware to McGill students and community members, with an eye towards promoting sustainable and environmentally-friendly practices.
The Daily spoke with Jamie Silverman, the General Coordinator of The Plate Club and a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Sustainability, Science and Society with minors in Urban Studies and International Development. We talked about The Plate Club’s history, what it means to be sustainable, and making the world a better place.This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Evan Goldstein, Co-VP Sustainability (left) and Jamie Silverman, General Coordinator (right). Image courtesy of Enid Kohler.
Enid Kohler for the McGill Daily (MD): How would you describe the Plate Club to someone who has never heard of it before?
Jamie Silverman (JS): So the Plate Club is a free dishware rental service. We essentially furnish dishware to any group on campus or to the broader Montreal community for free. This means that all our dishes are rented out, volunteers package up the orders, and then groups use them, usually for big events like back-to-school barbecues, parties, or end-of-year galas.
JS: The group has their event, they use the plates and glasses and cutlery (it’s not just plates!), and then they wash them and bring them back to us, and then we put them back in the office and do it all over again.
MD: How and when did the Plate Club start?
JS: It actually started in 2007: this has been going on forever. It was originally very avant-garde. It started on a smaller scale with more basics, and then as we grew and people started requesting our service more frequently, we were lacking inventory for like 400-person events, and so we started getting grants and funds to increase our inventory. We have thousands of items right now.
MD: How would you respond to a student club who uses recyclable or compostable products in the hopes of being sustainable, rather than using reusable ones? Why would you convince them to use Plate Club resources instead?
JS: I was actually looking up stats for this. I think you only have to use a reusable plate a handful of times for it to be better than compostables, because when you’re using compostables, it can still only be used once before it goes to the landfill. Whereas we’ve had these plates since 2007. They’re not going anywhere. They’re not breaking because most of our inventory is hard plastic, so they’re meant to last. We have so many people using our stuff that it’s definitely paid off for any kinds of disposables over time.
JS: Sustainability is made up of many facets, but one of them is economic sustainability. Even compostable dishes have to be bought new every time, whereas the Plate Club offers services for free. Let’s say you don’t care about the environment whatsoever. You’re still getting free dishware. Even if you don’t care about the environment, it doesn’t really make any sense, given the Plate Club’s services on campus, in my opinion, to do anything else.
MD: Do you have a favorite memory or an event that stands out to you from the past few years?
JS: I wouldn’t say I have a specific memory, but a continuous reminder of the accumulation of work over the last two years. It’s very physical, right? All of our dishware is material; you see the plates going out and coming back in. It’s a very material way of seeing your impact, quite directly in the orders that we’re preparing. So it’s pretty rewarding.
JS: I don’t know the exact numbers, but I know that every year we have over a hundred orders. We’re trying to create a sustainability report to assess exactly how many dishes we’re diverting. In a report from 2007 to 2017, the service diverted over 60,000 disposable items to landfill. There’s no recent reports, but I’m hoping to put more emphasis on that so that over the years we have a better idea of our impact.
MD: The theme of this column is “good people doing good things.” In the context of your work with the Plate Club, what does being a “good person” mean to you?
JS: For me, as a student studying Sustainability, Science and Society, I’ve always had a very societal outlook on life. And so I think being a good person is living within the collective while trying to better everything around you. And people take that in a lot of different ways. You don’t have to be working in sustainability to be bettering people’s lives. I think ultimately, it is about helping make the world a better place, which is what I see the Plate Club doing for McGill and Montreal.
Learn more about The Plate Club on Instagram, @theplateclub, or place orders for rent through their website, https://theplateclub.wixsite.com/mcgill/plate-rental.
End Note: If you know good people doing good things who you would like to see featured in this column, email news@mcgilldaily.com.