Eco Dishwashing Options

Recently our aged dishwasher suffered a slow and painful death, leaving me with a counter covered in dirty dishes. Actually, my counter is always covered in dirty dishes, but it felt worse because now I was going to have to wash them all by hand.

We had to wait about three weeks for a new amazing Energy Star dishwasher to arrive and it was quite a challenge to keep up with it all, especially as there are five of us in the house, with some of us around full time, cooking and eating and making messes. I do realize that this is a first world problem and many people do not own a dishwasher.

As my one little word for the year is “gratitude”, I tried to look at the problem from a new perspective. Here I was gifted with the opportunity to be water-wise and mindful of my energy use. I knew how to use as little water as possible to wash dishes when camping and I took this on as a challenge. Then I began to feel fairly self-righteous about the experience, assuming that I was washing dishes in an environmentally friendly way

As we got closer to the delivery date I began to feel guilty about getting a new dishwasher. Here I was coping without one and I wondered how “bad” it was going to be to go back to my oh so convenient dishwasher. I decided to do some research into hand washing versus dishwashing machines.

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