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What Exactly Is in Dishwasher Detergent?

by MarionRhem2128 Posted on December 26, 2015

Have you ever wondered how the chemicals in your dishwasher detergent can scrape off the nastiest grime without any scrubbing? Most detergents have special ingredients to work their magic, but many of these ingredients can be harmful to humans and aquatic life. Heres a closer look at what youre putting in your dishwasher.

How Dishwasher Detergent Works

A detergent has certain requirements to work properly in automatic dishwashers. One key factor is that it must not produce any foam or suds. These can inhibit the washing action. The detergent must also do the following:

Reduce the surface tension of water.
Tie up minerals in the water.
Emulsify grease and oil.
Allow water to sheet off surfaces to minimize water spots.
Protect metals from the corrosive effects of heat and water.

Typically, detergents use a mixture of synthetic chemicals and additives to accomplish all these functions.

Detergent Ingredients

The chemicals and additives used in most commercial dishwasher detergents typically fall into the following categories.

Alkaline builders. Soften hard water by combining with minerals, mostly calcium and magnesium. When minerals are kept in solution, they will not leave spots or film on the dishes. Builders are typically 90-95 percent of the volume of a dishwasher detergent.

Phosphates are a commonly used builder. They are known to pollute lakes and rivers, creating algae blooms that starve fish of oxygen. For this reason, the use of phosphates in dishwasher detergent has been banned in some U.S. states.

Surfactants. Lower the surface tension of water. This allows water to evenly spread over surfaces and seep into food residue more effectively in order to break it up.

Surfactants only make up 1-5 percent of a detergent. The types used in dishwasher detergent are considered fairly non-toxic, although some surfactants are associated with skin irritation and possible respiratory symptoms.

Corrosion inhibitors. Prevent rust and protect machine parts, metal utensils and other metal ware.

Many of these inhibitors are actually corrosive themselves. For instance, inhaling sodium silicate, a common inhibitor, can lead to severe irritation of the upper respiratory tract. It can also burn parts of the digestive system if swallowed, or burn skin on contact.

Chlorine compounds and bleaching agents. Sanitize dishes and break down proteins like eggs or milk. Also remove stains and reduce spotting of glassware.

These agents are often very poisonous. Due to the high concentration of chlorine in detergents, it has become the number one cause of household poisoning. Chlorine and bleaching agents are often what you smell when the dishwasher is working, and the fumes alone can cause respiratory problems.

Perfumes. Cover the chemical smell of the other ingredients and any stinky food residue on the dishes.

Over 3,000 chemicals are used to make perfume and fragrance mixtures. Some of these chemicals have been linked to dermatitis, allergies and respiratory issues.

Alkaline salts and oxidizing agents. Break down acids, grease and oil.

Many of these agents can be very corrosive if inhaled, touched or ingested.

Enzymes. Break down starches and proteins in food residue.

Enzyme preparations can be strong eye irritants, so its important to make sure you never splash or get any dishwasher detergent in your eyes.

Safer Options

Most of the chemical ingredients in dishwasher detergent will leave small amounts of residue on your dishes. This means youre eating tiny amounts with every meal.

Thankfully, healthier options for dishwasher detergent are available. In their Guide to Healthy Cleaning, the Environmental Working Group evaluates many commercial cleaning products available today.

They recently evaluated 105 dishwasher detergents. Out of these, a mere 12 received an A rating, which means they are considered relatively safe for human and environmental health. The top 12 are listed on their website.

Many recipes are also available for home-made dishwasher detergent. The effectiveness of these can vary depending on the type of water in your home and your individual dishwasher. If youre going to try a new recipe for detergent, its best to experiment with a small batch at first to see how it works.

Related
6 Mistakes Youre Probably Making With Your Dishwasher
27 Dishwasher Maintenance Tips to Maximize Performance
E-Cigarettes Are Definitely Not as Safe as You Think

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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What Exactly Is in Dishwasher Detergent?

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Soon You Will Be Able To Listen to "Rocky Raccoon" on Spotify

by CarrolHargis Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Our long national nightmare is nearly over:

Happy holidays from the Beatles: As of 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 24, the band’s music will finally be available on streaming services worldwide.

…The surviving members of the group, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with Universal Music Group, which controls the band’s recorded music, made no statements other than the fact that the Beatles’ catalog — 13 original albums and four compilations — will now be playable on nine subscription streaming music services.

Maybe I need to try one of these newfangled streaming thingies someday. I’ve heard rumors that music has continued to be produced over the past 30 years, and I suppose I should investigate that.

So: Beatles or Stones? Which are you?

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Soon You Will Be Able To Listen to "Rocky Raccoon" on Spotify

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ISIS Had a Good Year in PR, Not So Good on the Ground

by Aaleyah William Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Iraqi forces are fighting to retake control of Ramadi, a city of half a million about an hour west of Baghdad:

“I think the fall of Ramadi is inevitable,” said Col. Steven H. Warren, the United States military spokesman here. “The end is coming.” But he added: “That said, it’s going to be a tough fight.”

….If Iraqi forces manage to reassert control over Ramadi — the capital and largest city in Iraq’s western Anbar Province — it will be the latest in a series of military setbacks for the Islamic State. President Obama said recently that the militant group had lost 40 percent of the Iraqi territory it had seized in the middle of last year, as the United States and its allies have intensified their aerial bombardment against the group. In October, Iraqi forces and Shiite militias retook control of the northern city of Baiji and its oil refinery, and last month, Kurdish and Yazidi forces expelled the Islamic State out of the northern city of Sinjar.

Progress is slow but steady. The map below, from IHS, shows the territory lost by ISIS over the past year. There’s still a long way to go.

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ISIS Had a Good Year in PR, Not So Good on the Ground

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Quote of the Day: We Are Not Teaching Our Children Enough Vocabulary to Navigate the Modern World

by OCKLarae398127 Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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From a recent study on swearing:

Both formats produced positive correlations between COWAT fluency, animal fluency, and taboo word fluency, supporting the fluency-is-fluency hypothesis. In each study, a set of 10 taboo words accounted for 55–60% of all taboo word data.

What this means is that people who cuss a lot are smarter than the rest of you. So there. Wonkblog’s Ana Swanson, who apparently has access to the full paper, explains further:

In order to use bad words appropriately, people still have to understand nuanced distinctions about language, the paper says. As such, cursing isn’t a sign of a limited vocabulary at all. Past research has shown that when people are really at a loss for words, they tend to say things like “er” or “um,” rather than cursing. Other studies have shown that college students are more likely to use curse words, and that this group tends to have a larger vocabulary than the population in general.

“A voluminous taboo lexicon may better be considered an indicator of healthy verbal abilities rather than a cover for their deficiencies,” the researchers write.

Quite so. And on that score, the study’s findings should give us all pause. Take a look at the chart on the right, which shows the number of words people could dredge up in three different categories. Apparently the average American can come up with only 11 curse words. Eleven! That’s pathetic. I have dreams where I use more curse words than that. Of course, there’s much I don’t know about the methodology of this study. How much time did people have to come up with words? How unique did words have to be? Are fuck and fuckwit separate words, or merely different members of the vast fuck family? It would cost me $35.95 to find out, and you can guess how likely I am to spend my Christmas money on that.

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Quote of the Day: We Are Not Teaching Our Children Enough Vocabulary to Navigate the Modern World

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The Pentagon Is Preparing to Go to War With ISIS…on Twitter

by ErnestineHeighwa Posted on December 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) complained at last week’s GOP presidential debate debate that the United States isn’t doing enough to beat ISIS in the online propaganda battle. “Every war we have ever been involved in has had a propaganda informational aspect to it,” he said. “ISIS is winning the propaganda war.”

That’s probably true: Not only is ISIS skilled at recruiting people online, but the group’s huge, sophisticated video operation and its products are now a hallmark of its brand of terror. The US government’s efforts to counter that machine, led by the State Department, have mostly been a laughingstock. Now the diplomats are getting reinforcements from the Pentagon, which recently got approval to conduct its own online propaganda efforts against terrorist groups and their sympathizers.

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The Pentagon Is Preparing to Go to War With ISIS…on Twitter

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Did a Republican Megadonor Just Secretly Buy Nevada’s Biggest Newspaper?

by Michell11X Posted on December 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Conventional wisdom holds that you do not want to buy a newspaper because newspapers are terrible investments. Yet late last week, someone did buy the largest newspaper in Nevada, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and paid a premium for it. Even stranger, nobody knows who it was, and the new owners seem to be actively working to keep it that way.

The sale has created a controversy because, while there is no rule requiring a newspaper to disclose its owners, the Journal-Review will be, by far, the largest newspaper in America whose owners are secret. The intrigue is not just journalistic: For a well-heeled person interested in influencing an election, owning the largest paper in the state that in a few short months will hold one of the first nominating events of the primary season (third for Democrats and fourth for Republicans) is a good place to start.

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Did a Republican Megadonor Just Secretly Buy Nevada’s Biggest Newspaper?

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Here’s How Uber Is Trying to Get Out of a Huge Lawsuit

by RaymondPeningto Posted on December 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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For the past two years, car-hailing app Uber has tried several legal maneuvers to quash an ongoing class action lawsuit filed by a number of its drivers in California. They contend that they’ve been wrongly classified as contractors, instead of full employees, and that Uber has withheld some of their tips. On Friday, the $50 billion company deployed its latest tactic: An updated driver agreement began popping up on Uber apps nationwide that drivers were required to sign before being able to accept any new rides over the weekend, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. But many see this agreement as the company’s most recent attempt to knee-cap the class action lawsuit.

In 2014, Uber rewrote its driver agreements to include an arbitration clause that stripped drivers of their right to sue the company in regular court. On Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco threw out that agreement, making it possible for the ongoing class action to include all of the 160,000 drivers who have worked for Uber in California since 2009.

Two days later, Uber added language about arbitration to its driver agreements that could skirt that ruling, preventing new drivers from signing on to the class action lawsuit. Binding arbitration clauses require workers to resolve disputes in private, confidential sessions with paid arbitrators rather than in court. They also usually prohibit workers both from appealing the initial arbitration decision and, as is the case in Uber’s new driver agreement, participating in class actions.

“We believe this is an illegal attempt by Uber to usurp the court’s role now in overseeing the process of who is included in the class,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, the Boston-based attorney who is leading the lawsuit against Uber, told the San Francisco Chronicle. Liss-Riordan is filing an emergency motion that will be heard by Judge Chen on Thursday, asking the court to prevent Uber from enforcing this new agreement.

If drivers manage to get to the final paragraphs of the complex 21-page agreement, they’ll discover that they don’t have to sign off on the new arbitration clause at all. By emailing Uber directly with their decision to opt out of being forced to resolve their disputes with binding arbitration, they would be able to continue to drive. The new agreement also won’t affect those drivers who are already participating in the lawsuit.

The ongoing lawsuit challenges two aspects of how the $50 billion company treats workers: first, it claims that Uber has misclassified its workers as contractors, depriving them of crucial employee benefits such as vehicle maintenance expenses. It also alleges that the company has been manipulating ride prices by incorrectly assuring riders that a full tip is included in the fare when, in fact, Uber has kept a portion of those tips rather than remitting them fully to drivers. The suit asks Uber to reimburse drivers for lost tips and expenses, plus interest. If the group of plaintiffs grows by 160,000 drivers, the civil penalties requested in this suit could get very expensive for Uber.

Liss-Riordan explains that Uber is trying to thwart the class action because the alternative—lots of individual lawsuits—would be much simpler and cheaper for the company to handle. The time and money involved in hiring a lawyer would deter many drivers from ever pursuing an individual lawsuit. “And of course, Uber does not want to be sued 160,000 times,” Liss-Riordan told Mother Jones in October. “What it wants is for most of these drivers just to go away.”

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Here’s How Uber Is Trying to Get Out of a Huge Lawsuit

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Inside the Difficult, Dangerous Work of Tallying the ISIS Death Toll

by MiriamPTCZ Posted on December 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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The week after ISIS launched its catastrophic November attacks in Paris, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) published its annual “Global Terrorism Index.” It contained an unexpected finding: By killing 6,664 people in 2014, the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram was the world’s deadliest terrorist group, beating out ISIS by nearly 600 victims. But the report, with its exact-sounding figures, raises a question: Is it really possible to know how many people ISIS has killed?

As in many conflicts, assessing the actual toll of the Syrian civil war is a difficult, potentially dangerous business. And when it comes to putting a precise number on ISIS’ death toll, researchers who track these grim statistics are skeptical. “My gut instinct is, we don’t know,” says Megan Price, the executive director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). “I don’t think those are knowable numbers.”

“What we know is just a part of what is going on,” says Bassam al-Ahmad, the spokesman for the Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC), a monitoring organization that gathers information from inside the country to maintain a running count of how many people have died in its nearly five-year-old conflict. Using a three-stage documentation process, the VDC has confirmed the deaths of 4,406 people at the hands of ISIS so far. But Ahmad says that is by no means the total number. “What is the percentage of what we know?” he asks. “Maybe around 50 percent.”

And uncovering the information needed from ISIS territory presents even greater challenges. Media and NGO access is all but barred. In the group’s Syrian capital, Raqqa, internet cafés have been forced to close, and in other areas ISIS militants have put them under surveillance, making it difficult for activists to share information with the outside world. There are consequences for those who dig up information that the insurgent group doesn’t want publicized, like kidnappings, torture, and executions. In January 2014, ISIS militants kidnapped one of the VDC’s reporters in Raqqa. “They came to his house and abducted him,” says Ahmad. “Until now, we don’t know anything. We have sources who say he was beaten and tortured.”

That reporter, as well as four other VDC employees who disappeared from the Syrian city, Duma, in December 2013 and have not been heard from since, are not included in the group’s tally of the dead. The VDC does not know if they’re alive, but it also has no way to confirm their deaths. It’s not an uncommon problem. “We hear many stories about people who are kidnapped by ISIS and are executed. But sometimes you have no information about them. If you don’t have information about an incident, that doesn’t mean something hasn’t happened,” Ahmad says. The number of people who have simply vanished in Syria is in the tens of thousands. They are not included in the VDC’s count.

“Violence can be hidden,” says Price. “ISIS has its own agenda. Sometimes that agenda is served by making public things they’ve done, and I have to assume, sometimes it’s served by hiding things they’ve done.” For example, after Kurdish forces recaptured the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar from ISIS last month, as many as 16 previously unknown mass graves were uncovered.

In determining ISIS’ 2014 death toll at 6,073 people, the IEP drew its data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, which uses publicly available materials like news articles and legal documents to establish its estimates. It’s a common documentation method, but it can be limiting because more newsworthy events, like bombings with a high number of casualties, make it into the data, but under-the-radar deaths may not.

“Traumatic events that cause multiple deaths get very well communicated—and maybe even exaggerated—in their frequency and occurrence compared to more mundane, violent acts that result in death,” says Les Roberts, a professor of population and family health at Columbia University and a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist who has led dozens of surveys on mortality in war zones, including in Iraq. (Read more about the controversy surrounding his 2004 estimate that 100,000 civilians were killed after the American invasion.) “A bomb is newsworthy. A bomb is big enough that the people in the morgue when you call them will say, ‘Oh yeah, we had four deaths in here,’ because they came in together and they create a psychological image, even though they had 42 dead bodies come in from a variety of other causes, mostly gunshot wounds.” In ISIS’ case, this may mean that public mass executions and suicide bombings get counted while other atrocities are overlooked.

Getting a grip on ISIS’ impact is just part of the larger struggle to get an accurate picture of the carnage in Syria. The VDC has confirmed approximately 200,000 casualties by name, photos, or videos. Their number is dwarfed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’ most recent estimate of as many as 330,000 casualties. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stopped providing public estimates of Syrian casualties after January 2014, saying it could no longer guarantee the accuracy of its source material.

According to Price, the HRDAG intends to publish new numbers in early 2016—nearly two years after the last public UN estimate. These figures will be based on not only cases gathered by the VDC and three other groups documenting deaths in Syria, but an extrapolated estimate of unreported deaths. Even if it’s the most accurate account to get presented, however, the new number will still likely be off. “Having looked at the data in this particular conflict, as well as several others, the safe answer always is: that number is too low,” Price says.

Roberts notes that it can be hard to collect reliable casualty data even in a country that’s at peace. “In the United States, which I think is a near-optimal environment for us investigating murders,” says Roberts, “our best estimate is that something in the ballpark of one-third of murders are never detected.” Sometimes a death is misclassified as an accident or a suicide, or a body is never found. Now imagine trying to get this information with ISIS breathing down your neck. “If in the United States we have a gross undercount of murders, how can we expect in the anarchy of Syria that it’s going to be even comparable?”

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Inside the Difficult, Dangerous Work of Tallying the ISIS Death Toll

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The Shocking New Numbers on HIV in America

by JordynSweat Posted on December 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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On the surface, the news about HIV in the United States sounds good. According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the diagnosis rate dropped 19 percent from 2005 to 2014—a dramatic decline. Among heterosexuals, new HIV diagnoses fell by 35 percent; among people who inject drugs, 63 percent; among women, 40 percent. And the CDC estimates that 87 percent of people with HIV know their status, representing a modest gain in testing and awareness.

Yet the trend toward steady diagnosis rates masks large disparities among men who have sex with men (MSM), who account for 67 percent of HIV-positive Americans. For black men in this group, already disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS, diagnoses rose 22 percent; for Latino men, they’ve increased almost a quarter, an increase likely attributable to more infections, not better testing, the CDC told The Verge.

The steepest increases in HIV diagnoses have occurred among black and Latino gay youth between the ages of 13 and 24: 5,540 teens received the diagnosis in 2014, a rise of 87 percent since 2005.

Diagnosis stats tell only part of the story: More than two-thirds of transmissions come from people who know that they are HIV positive but are not receiving care. Just 39 percent of people with HIV are being treated for it; only 30 percent have a reduced viral load.

Last Tuesday, CDC director Thomas Frienden published an essay with Jonathan Mermin, the government’s HIV/AIDS prevention chief, warning that the United States may still lose the fight against AIDS. “Hundreds of thousands of people with diagnosed HIV infection are not receiving care,” they wrote. “These people account for most new HIV transmissions in the United States.”

In July, the government released a list of targets for 2020 to measure progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS. They included reducing new diagnoses by at least 25 percent, boosting the percentage of HIV-positive people receiving medical care to 90 percent, and increasing the percentage with suppressed viral loads to 80 percent.

The techniques to fight those battles exist. One promising preventative therapy involves treating uninfected but at-risk people with a combination of anti-HIV drugs known as Truvada. And in May, the CDC halted a study on the effects of early treatment because its benefits were so obvious.

But just because the drugs exist doesn’t mean that people can access them. Last year, CDC researchers highlighted how difficult it can be for some minority communities to receive health care and supportive services for HIV, and they called for better outreach from state and local health departments, community-based organizations, and individual health care providers.

“Faster progress depends on our collective ability to take full advantage of these tools in every community and every region of the country,” wrote the CDC researchers in the latest report. “We need to boldly address stigma, discrimination, and other social, economic, and structural issues that increase vulnerability to HIV and come between people and the care they need.”

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The Shocking New Numbers on HIV in America

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Would you prefer your meat well-traveled or cloned, China?

by Ahmad6486yebta Posted on December 3, 2015

Would you prefer your meat well-traveled or cloned, China?

By on 3 Dec 2015commentsShare

Remember when eating sustainably meant just having to choose between a local, non-organic tomato and an organic one flown in from Chile? Well, those were the good ole days.

Now, thanks to advances in genetic engineering, our food choices are about to get a lot more complicated. Take China, for example. Instead of debating the merits of a pesticide-free Caprese salad over a low-emission salsa, Chinese consumers might soon have to choose between cows flown in from Australia and ones grown in a cloning facility in the northern city of Tianjin.

As Bloomberg noted last month, China recently received a shipment of 150 live Australian cattle via 747 — the first of many shipments to come, as the country struggles to meet its citizens’ growing demand for beef:

China will eat an extra 2.2 million tons of beef a year by 2025, according to Rabobank — enough to make 19 billion quarter-pounders. The demand pushed up Chinese prices fourfold since 2000 to about $10 a kilogram in
June — making them among the most expensive in the world and more than double the benchmark rate in Australia.

… Part of the reason for growth is a change in diet. For centuries, China’s favored meat has been pork, partly because backyard pigs not only supplied meat, but were good at turning waste into manure. Until recently, beef — once known as “millionaire’s meat” — was very rare. With China’s recent rapid urbanization and the rise of a middle class, that’s changing.

And because of beef’s demotion from “millionaire’s meat,” in addition to importing both live cattle and frozen, ready-to-eat beef from the Aussies, China is also gearing up to start mass producing cloned cattle, The Washington Post reports:

The commercial cloning project is a joint venture between Sinica (a subsidiary of Boyalife Group), Peking University’s Institute of Molecular Medicine, the Tianjin International Joint Academy of Biomedicine, and South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. The plan is to finish completion of the $31 million commercial cloning facility in the first half of 2016, and then start production of 100,000 cattle per year. Within five years, the facility plans to ramp up to 1 million cattle a year.

If you’re someone who likes to buy grass-fed beef from an independent farmer at your local farmer’s market, then chances are, you’re not gonna like airborne beef or cattle clones. But as our own Nathanael Johnson pointed out earlier this summer in our Meat: What’s smart, what’s right, what’s next series, those quaint ranchers aren’t going to cut it when it comes to feeding a growing world population.

So the question is: Would you opt for a farm-raised cow that just endured a 13-hour flight standing in its own feces, or a local cow that came from a lab? Think carefully, because China isn’t the only country starting to merge farm and laboratory. Last month, the FDA declared a salmon genetically modified to grow to market size in half the time of regular salmon safe for human consumption. The fish will be the first genetically engineered animal to hit U.S. markets and will no doubt spawn a lot of debate over what we should be eating.

And it’s probably best to get that debate rolling sooner rather than later. Because as silly as agonizing over local vs. organic tomatoes might seem now, agonizing over air-lifted vs. cloned cattle might not be far behind as we hone our ability to manipulate genes.

Just this week, in fact, a bunch of scientists and ethicists met in Washington, DC., to discuss the prospect of genetically engineering humans. Crazy, right? Actually, China already tried to do something like that earlier this year. And according to The Washington Post, the country is similarly nonchalant about cloning humans:

According to Boyalife’s chief executive, Xu Xiaochun, the plan is to move on from cloning cattle for food purposes to cloning primates for research purposes. And from primates, guess what the next step would be? Yep, humans. “The technology is already there,” Xu says. “If this is allowed, I don’t think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology.” Right now, the company is just being “self-restrained” about cloning humans until all those bothersome moral and ethical questions go away.

Oy. If we’re gonna start talking about genetically engineered humans, I’m gonna need to fuel up. Should I get the cloned cattle steak or the GM-salmon burger?

Source:

What happens when Chinese supermarkets start selling beef from a test tube

, The Washington Post.

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Would you prefer your meat well-traveled or cloned, China?

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