I need to do a load of dishes. After everyone has gone to work in the morning, I try to get a load done so I’m not doing it at bedtime when I’m most tired. Some days, tired or not, I have to do two loads of dishes. The worst part of it is that no matter how I try to Tetris the hell out of that space, I still end up with one or two items that don’t fit. That leaves me with a kitchen that is mostly clean, but not quite.
If, as one friend suggested, I were to put dishes into the dishwasher as they were dirtied, then run it when it got full, I’d inevitably have to rearrange everything because someone didn’t play the Tetris game and there would be lots of extra room for dishes in a load. Plus, there would be a chance I’d forget where we were in the cycle and eat from a dirty plate. Ew.
But I like to pretend the main reason is that I’m good to the environment when I jam as many dishes into my dishwasher as I can fit to be efficient with water and energy.
Oh, the agony of doing dishes, right? Spoiled, right?
Yeah, I admit that I’m spoiled. Most of us are.
And let’s consider dishwasher tablets.
I shop at Costco and found that finish Powerball makes the ones that clean my dishes the best. Clean dishes in one load: efficient. Good for me. Good for the environment.
But then they began to package their tablets in little plastic pouches inside the plastic tub. What a packaging overdose. I guess it kept those tablets from breaking into pieces in transit, but I didn’t plan on returning a mostly-used box of dishwasher tabs because a couple of them at the bottom were broken.
Plus, it was hard to get the little suckers out of their plastic pouches after my hands had been slimed with water and food residue. The worst part was knowing that every single one of those little plastic pouches went into the garbage to join the garbage gyres in the oceans.
Then one day, I opened a new container of dishwasher tabs and they were coated with a little bit of goo that went right into your dishwasher and melted off during the cycle. Yay! No struggling to open any pouches. No extra plastic in the gyre. But these still came in a big plastic tub. It was better for the environment, but not perfect.
A few months went by and I realized I needed to go to Costco again. Damn! No time. I ran from errand to errand to try to get done before work, so I figured Mike would forgive me if I skipped Costco and bought some dishwasher tabs from Albertson’s instead.
The cool thing was that I could buy my favorite brand, finish Powerball, and they came in a recyclable cardboard container! Was this company joining in the effort to save the planet from being drowned in a pile of plastic?
It looked like it was.
That night when I ran a load of dishes, I opened that wonderful recyclable cardboard box.
Inside were nested fifty finish Powerball tablets, each individually wrapped in a little bit of plastic.
Argh!
Thank you for listening, jules