Water vs. foil

Last night I baked some sweet potatoes in the oven. The recipe I was following said to cover a baking sheet with foil before baking. This is a very common recommendation due to the easy cleanup. Just toss the foil and you're done. But I often feel that it's a waste of foil so I choose to just wash my baking sheet instead. However, it does take extra scrubbing and I often wonder about the tradeoffs of using more water vs. sending the foil to the landfill. 

Foil can technically be recycled, but it is usually too dirty to be accepted. For dryer applications it can easily be rinsed off and reused multiple times before recycling, but most foil ends up in the trash. According to Earth911 it would take around 400 years for foil to break down in a landfill. Given that, along with the manufacturing implications of the demand for foil, it seems like washing is a better option. Especially since I do have more control over how much water I use during the process. I can do a lot of soaking and prescrubbing without having the water run the entire cleaning time.