Washing Dishes
Credit: Ken Benner/Cartoonstock
If you google ‘Is it more environmentally friendly to use a dishwasher or to handwash dishes?’, you will get a long list of articles telling you that dishwashers are better. I disagree.
I am guessing you don’t. If you are a reader of this blog, you are most likely a well-informed, climate conscious eco-warrior who has read all those articles, plus several studies, and you have humbly conceded that your expensive, energy-efficient dishwasher will do a much more environmentally friendly job of washing dishes than you will with a sponge. You would like to add, I’m sure, that you only ever use it on the eco setting and always open the door before the load finishes so that your crockery is able to air dry.
If this sounds like you, then I will fully acknowledge that you are doing an excellent job. Well done. I still disagree that dishwashers are the best strategy though, and once you have mastered the art of manual dishwashing, you will hopefully agree that doing them by hand is not just the better option—it is truly life changing.
Okay, life changing is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it will definitely make you feel good about yourself. Like that self-satisfied feeling you get from perfectly packing a dishwasher, only better.
To explain my reasoning, I need to begin by shaming the ever willing, yet grossly overconfident, standard dishwasher. Apologies if I offend any AI-embodied appliances reading this, but its main purpose is to wash our dishes and it rarely does better than a mediocre job. New stains appearing on coffee cups, food particles inserted into glasses, and coffee granules added to breakfast bowls are the most common outcomes when my dishwasher attempts to complete its only appointed task.
I was forgiving for quite a long time. I even developed strategies to alleviate the pressure on my dishwasher to perform. I tried reducing the number of dishes per load, rearranging how things were stacked, and leaving out any types of crockery that my dishwasher appeared not to get on well with.
When that was all ineffective, I turned into a helicopter parent, hovering anxiously around my appliance during every cycle. The moment it switched over to the drying mode I would put an end to its eager attempt to clean the dishes by stopping the cycle, yanking open the door and drying all of the dishes by hand.
That helped a little. At the very least, the food particles hadn’t yet baked onto my (not so clean) freshly washed crockery. Most of it could just be wiped and put away. Unfortunately, I was still always left with at least half a dozen items that looked dirtier after washing than when they went in. They all had to be piled into the sink for a rewash.
Now I am fully aware that, at this point, any reader with a dishwasher will have have a very loud and assertive opinion about how to fix the problem. I can assure you, I thought of all of them. I regularly cleaned filters and hoses, ran rinse cycles, thoroughly scraped, and (as my desperation mounted) even pre-rinsed. I’ll admit too that, on a number of occasions, I resorted to using the hot and heavy (i.e. 70 degree) cycle—but only in the summer, in the middle of hot days, and because I have solar. Nothing worked. My dishes remained in an unsatisfactory state of semi-cleanness.
What more was there to do? I didn't want to give up. The dishwasher is supposed to be the environmentalist's favourite appliance. The one that is meant to convince us that spending a huge amount of money, energy and resources to mine, manufacture, purchase, and transport an appliance into your house is worth it because, long term, technology is better than doing things by hand. It is supposed to reinforce the message that by building more stuff we can engineer our way out of the climate crisis.
My confidence in a technological solution to the environmental crisis is, to be honest, quite low. If we cannot even master the humble dishwasher, what hope do we have for a planet-saving technological solution to the gargantuan amount of CO2 pouring into the atmosphere every year?
It would have been better if nobody had gone to the trouble of making my dishwasher. Now it is just being used to fill an otherwise useless hole below my sink. I don’t think I will turn it on again. I gave it a good go. Like all relationships where one side resolutely sees that the other has potential while the partner resolutely refuses to change, I persevered with my dishwasher for over two years. Then one day, several months ago, I stopped.
There was no great calamity of a wash that brought the whole relationship down. It was more a gradual wearing out of hope that my dishwasher would change. I realised that no matter how much effort we both put in, I was never going to open the door to a sparkling clean load.
And as always happens after dumping someone that you’ve come to regard as an incompetant good-for-nothing, I eventually had to admit that I was partly to blame. I simply wasn't washing enough. Like all good environmentalists, I reused the same mug over the entire day and never wasted precious dishwasher space on a pot or a pan. Like all good introverts, I strictly avoided inviting anyone over for a meal. Thus the dishwasher only ever went on once every five days and, by that stage, any food particles left on plates or bowls had well and truly fused to the ceramic.
And so it was that the dishwasher and I parted ways, and I had to come up with a strategy that would make handwashing as eco-friendly as my dishwasher.
There are two elements to consider here. The first is the energy used to heat the water and power the machine. The second is the amount of water used.
Resolving the first part was easy. My hands would do the hard work and I would wash in cold. No burning of energy required. Well, except some extra calories, but nobody needs to eat more just to scrub a few plates.
Washing dishes in cold should be standard for anyone handwashing. We don't feel the need to heat water every time we use the bathroom and wash our hands because the soap lathers perfectly fine in cold, and the lathering and rinsing removes the bacteria. If you’re doubtful, google it. Dishes are the same. You just need enough soap* to lather them properly, enough arm power to give them a good scrub, and a little water to rinse them. It might take a tad more elbow work to clean a burnt pot, but a bit of hard work won’t do anyone in our modern society any harm. It might even somewhat make up for the fact that people now outsource their floor-cleaning-calorie-burning opportunities to a Robovac.
So if we start by washing in cold and air drying on the dish rack, we have already converted all of the fossil fuel energy used for dishwashing into muscle energy. I'm aware that it takes fossil fuels to make a dish rack, but as they are one of the few homeware items any of us can afford when we move out of our parent’s house, I assume anybody reading this already has one.**
The challenge for handwashers who also strive to be smug eco-warriors is the use of water, but this too is resolvable.
I figured out that for handwashing to come out on top in terms of water use, I needed to keep it under three litres per day. My model of dishwasher (on a regular or eco cycle) uses 11.6 litres and I was turning it on every five days. I also did a little daily handwashing for pots, pans, chopping boards, post-dishwasher rewashing, et cetera, so it probably worked out to be about fifteen litres every five days. (Nb. That’s probably a pretty good per person daily benchmark, but it’s also worth googling your own dishwasher model as their water use varies.)
Once I figured out how to do it, it is actually quite easy to use under three litres of water per day to wash all the dishes. The only thing you need is two containers. The first needs to be a big bucket that goes in your bathroom. Hopefully you already have one there. It is the one used to catch water when showering, which then gets used to flush the toilet. The second container (or bucket or tray) is smaller and sits in the kitchen sink. I use a plastic fridge storage tray, which fits perfectly into the basin.
Once the two containers are in place, the art of environmentally friendly dishwashing is as follows:
Don’t wash single items. Wait till your sink container has a pile in it.
Wet the sponge and pour on a little detergent.
The above step will also have wet the top of the pile. With the water off, give the top item a scrub.
Turn the tap on at a low flow and rinse it. This will also wet the dishes below.
Keep repeating this process of scrubbing with the tap off and rinsing each item under a low flow until you get to the bottom, using the water in the container if you need to rinse the sponge or soak anything.
When finished, pour your sink container into your bathroom bucket then use the same water to flush the toilet.
Not only do you use about the same amount of water as your dishwasher was using, you are also reducing the amount of additional water you use to flush down the toilet. The toilet water might be a funny colour from time to time, but I doubt it will offend your toilet bowl too much considering what it normally has to deal with.
Washing a small pile of dishes once or twice a day, rather than putting things into the dishwasher, also means you’ll never risk running out of mugs, and that means you won’t need to own so many of them. (A bonus environmental win.)
Most importantly, your new eco-friendly dishwashing process is going to make you feel wonderful. It might take a little effort to get used to it, but it will quickly become a habit. An enjoyable habit, at that. Every time I wash dishes, I feel like I am competing with myself to keep the water in the sink tray low and it is impossible to feel like I am doing a chore when it feels like I’m winning.
Also, the visual act of saving water can’t help but remind you that you’re an exceptional individual who is saving the planet while simultaneously saving money on the water and electricity bills.
Lastly, you are physically doing a domestic task instead of offloading it to a machine, and it is always better for our mental health when we do things ourselves. For all the joys of modern technology, they will never give humans the sense of satisfaction we get from doing things by hand. Doing the dishes might seem annoying at first, but all the little things add up (both for the environment and our happiness) and once this routine is in place, other domestic tasks might seem a little less daunting.
The Quiet EnvironmentalistFURTHER READING
BBC Two - Trust Me, I'm a Doctor, Series 9, Episode 2 - What's the best way to clean your dishes?
What Are the Most Eco-Friendly Ways to Wash Dishes? - The Earthling Co.
5 Earth-friendly ways to wash your dishes (nationalgeographic.com)
What Is The Most Sustainable Way To Wash Your Dishes? (blueland.com)
Green Eco Living: The best green way to wash dishes: eco friendly dishwashing
How to wash dishes sustainably and 16 useful products | CNN Underscored
What's the carbon footprint of ... doing the dishes? | Environment | The Guardian
How to Wash Dishes (with Very Little Water!) : 4 Steps (with Pictures) - Instructables
* An eco soap brand, obviously.
Also, when I say ‘enough soap’, I don’t mean covering your cloth so entirely that you end up giving your dishes a bubble path. Just enough to put a little lather onto the plates and take the food particles off. Anything more than that and you are just pouring excessive chemicals down the sink and purchasing more plastic detergent bottles than you need to. That was clearly the intention of whoever invented those dishcloths where you pour the detergent into the handle. The companies that sell them were obviously looking for a way to get consumers to pour bottles of detergent directly down the sink and this was what they came up with.
Someone bought one of them for the office and I was so horrified by the amount of soap it was wasting that I strategically hid it in the top corner of an unused kitchen cupboard. I should have thrown it out, but I hate to send anything to landfill that is still technically usable. Therefore, I compromised and placed it where it could be used in a dishwashing emergency. The fact that nobody else in the office knows about the secret location is intentional. Considering how much trouble my colleagues have putting things into the correct bins, it is best not give them them any more environmental management responsibility than a bottle of eco-detergent and standard issue sponge.
** I actually don’t own a dish rack and I did briefly consider buying one when I stopped using the dishwasher. Then I remembered that the dishwasher was just an enormous dish rack. Now when I wash dishes, I simply open the door and stick everything on the racks to air dry. Not only did I avoid having to buy something new, this solution has vastly improved my relationship with the decommissioned appliance.
Published 05 January 2025
