Canadians may have noticed dishes no longer have the same shiny clean appearance when they unload their dishwashers. This isn’t a faulty dishwasher but the result of a federal government ban on the use of phosphates in such products. US readers in the 17 states with similar rules may have the same problem.
Fortunately the intrepid consumer products department at The Daily Bayonet has a fix for you - with the added bonus that it’s likely to drive hippies nuts. Bleach. There’s even a handy product from Cascade that contains bleach* so that you don’t need to add any in each wash:
Now there are good reasons to reduce phosphate levels in water, so I’ll not snark about greenwashing even though it is mighty tempting especially in the context of, well, washing things. But I can’t imagine more bleach entering the water cycle is exactly what the government had in mind either - which means this ban is guilty of short-sightedness. Much like the millions of mercury-laden CFL’s headed to landfills, the unintended consequences are unlikely to be inconsequential.
*The Daily Bayonet has received no compensation, incentive of free product or cash for recommending Cascade. Which is disappointing, frankly.
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Clueless governments just have to keep interfering.
They have removed the phosphate, to get the same cleaning action put a little trisodium phosphate TSP in the dishwasher, it is sold in any hardware store usually in the paint section, its cheap too. I’m thinking maybe half a teaspoon, but you are gonna need to experiment
It is a degreaser par excellence, just go easy on the amount used, I don’t want to be responsible for degreasing any moving parts and causing failure. The machines were designed for small amounts of phosphate cleaners so judicious use is not going to be avoiding warranties.
No need to tell the soap-dodgers.
Don’t tell the hippies, but if you want to add the phosphates back in to your dishwashing soap so that your dishes actually get clean, you can buy phosphates (TSP) at just about any Home Depot or other hardware or paint store.
Actually bleach (CL2) in the front end of a Municipal sewage system is not a bad thing. bleach (CL2) is an oxidizer which helps in reducing the production of H2S and kills pathogens. Potable water always carries a residule amount of CL2 into the sewage system and unless you dump a tanker load of bleach into the front end of a sewage plant it is actually beneficial to the sewage treatment process. Phosphorous and phosphates are expensive and hard to remove and end up as excess nutrients in the effluent discharge which can cause algae blooms, which depletes oxygen, except where zebra muscles exist in great numbers. Not long ago there was talk of mandating sewage treatment plants in Ontario to INCREASE phosphorous output in the spring and late fall to counter act the nutrients that zebra muscles were removing from the Great Lakes.
Thanks for the information WTF - I knew about algae blooms but the news about beneficial bleach is new to me
The amounts of bleach we are talking about going into the sewage system is insignificant really and would get ‘used up’ fairly quickly. If however the same amount of bleach was to be put into a river or storm sewer it would be a different story. Sewage treatment plants now have to de-chlorinate the efflent, if CL2 is being used for disinfection, so no CL2 gets into the natural environment for some very good reasons which I won’t go into here. Most treatment plants I am familiar with now use ultrviolet light for disinfection rather than CL2. There are limits to everything though and if a great amount of bleach / CL2 was dumped into the front end of a sewage treatment plant then beneficial bacteria would be destroyed and the treatment process relies on those bacteria to turn raw sewage into clean effluent. Sorry for taking up server space but this is one topic I can offer some information on. Most other topics I rely on snark 😉
Please, never apologize for sharing knowledge, it’s worth its weight in server space and despite the snark I prefer to be wrong and learn something than live in the dark and make wrong assumptions.
I’ve said before that if environmentalists were the kind of people that took care of nature with realistic and rational ideas or solutions that I’d probably be one among their number. But they’re not, so snark it is.
You are definetly right about one thing as far as bleach / CL2 is concerned. Hippies hate it because it disinfects and cleans 😉