Spokane’s ban on phosphates is driving homemakers to smuggling their soap:

“With the ‘green’ stuff, the dishes come out with a real slippery texture — like somebody poured a cup of grease in some dishwater — and a white film. Just really gross,” Marcotte said. “And then the food gunk just mixes around the dishwasher and when it stops, it just settles on whatever’s there. I mean, it’s bad.”

You think that’s bad, lady, you should see what the old detergents do to a river.

Acting as a fertilizer in the water, phosphates promote the uncontrolled growth of often-toxic algae blooms that, when they die back, nurture bacteria. That bacteria rapidly consume much of the oxygen in the water, leaving little for plants and fish.

The Spokane River is considered one of the nation’s most endangered, threatened by mining pollution, sewage treatment plant outfalls and heavy drawdowns of river water that tend to concentrate pollutants.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

13 replies on “Ring-Around-the-Collar Crime”

  1. They found a real dope. 7th Generation dish soap was the highest rated in a consumer reports comparison a couple of years ago.

  3. I’ve been using phosphate-free soap for years. It doesn’t seem to work quite as well on animal fat, but it’s not the end of the world. Does the woman in that article have a 100 percent beef diet?

  4. For those reading this in the Seattle area, our wastewater outfalls typically discharge into saltwater, and because phosphorous is not a limiting nutrient in saltwater ecosystems, the use of phosphate-containing detergents does not cause eutrophication.

  6. @3
    i wouldn’t put an all beef diet past any spokanite. just to frame the article, spokane is the whiniest city per capita in the world.

    thank god i left.

  8. @4 Thanks for bringing some ecological relevance to this–green for the sake of appearances rather than effectiveness drives me (and most of the ecologists I know) crazy.. I wonder also how much the typical household contributes, phosphate-wise.

    Also, does any one know what the anthropogenic nitrogen input into the Spokane river is? Is it really phosphates doing this? So often with algal blooms it’s really release of nitrogen limitation that promotes them.

  10. If Seattle ever does this I’ll finally have my excuse to use only paper plates and plastic cups and cutlery. (Maybe she should consider doing so…)

  13. @7 nails it, i feel like for the most part, this isn’t about being ‘environmentally unfriendly’ but rather about homeowners dealing with hard water.

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