paper plates

One never knows what one's going to find on Union Street (or Mine Street - there was a sad and blurred photograph on a tree today advertising a missing ferret): today's gem was a paper plate mashed into the tarmac.   Which had me thinking - given our current class theme of photography and the environment - are paper plates environmentally sound?    Should one use them, or a dishwasher?   (we shifted to using paper plates last year at the National Humanities Center during the Great North Carolina Drought, and I meant to look into the issue then).

According to everything I could unearth in a cursory hunt: use porcelain plates, use the dishwasher.   Even if your paper plate was made from recycled paper (and what's the betting that this one wasn't?), it cost power to produce, transport, wrap (in what?), store, etc.   And unless one composts it, and the remains of the food on it (a perfectly viable option - though I don't know if it would work with one of those really waxy ones), there's then the problem of disposing of it somewhere more ecologically sound that outside my office.   Dishwashers, it would seem, are sounder than washing dishes by hand, even (unless one rinses the food off the plates first, which is not to be done) - though I notice that none of the sites I consulted mentioned the toxic junk and power and minerals and bits of wiring and circuit boards and elements and whatever else goes into making a dishwasher - not to mention disposing of its obsolete corpse.   One website suggested using a baked potato, which seemed overly complicated, given that pita bread is a handy receptacle - or there's even a sandwich.