Replacing storebought dishwasher tablets

In my quest for clean water, dishwasher tablets came on my radar when I asked ChatGPT one day how they worked and specifically what the scrubby thing in the tabs are. The answer turned my stomach.

The main catalyst for this conversation to begin was the fact that living in the country, we have a septic tank and bed. This means that while the tank is pumped every couple years, it is not a closed system. A septic bed is compose of a layer of composite material underground. It literally is a large bed which the overflow water from the septic tank drains into. Natural bacteria will break down the "leachate" (the water less the settled solids still in the tank which break down on its own).

So what you put into your system is important. And what I learned about dishwasher tabs was shocking. We use plastics in them. As we know microplastics are not currently handled in civil water engineering. So the filmy packaging, and the scubby bits are dissovable plastic products which a quick search reveals do not fully break down in nature, leaving plastic waste going upstream. Frankly, as a resident of Eastern Canada on Lake Ontario, thinking about the accumulated unfiltered waste of 30M people go by my bay, sickens me.

It's actually quite easy. Here are the ingredients and why they are used.

• 1 cup washing soda (sodium carbonate)
• 1 cup baking soda
• ½ cup citric acid (for shine and to cut through grease)
• ½ cup kosher salt (optional, to soften water)

Below are the four products I sourced, why, with the quantities, and the affiliated Amazon links. We appreciate the support this revenue provides for making more content.

Qty: 1 cup

I picked this brand because it was cheaper, is Canadian-made, and has sodium carbonate with no additives.

Ultimately, in nature sodium carbonate breaks down as sodium ions, bicarbonate, and carbon dioxide, depending on the environment. This has a footprint as a whole in the water and carbon cycles, but at least you are not adding extra stuff like surfactants and chemical aromas.

Qty: 0.5 cup

Picked for being a Canadian brand, food grade with no additives.

Citric acid is used to break through the grease and help dissolve fat solids. It also helps give a shiny finish.

Qty: 1 cup

Ubiquitous baking soda recognizable anywhere. It helps lower and buffer pH which helps the cleaning action take place, soften the water to deal with scale and provide a mild abrasive for scrubbing.

Qty: 0.5 cup

This salt is chosen to be additive-free, and cheaper than Kosher salt. Yupik is a favourite Canadian brand for bulk herbs, spices. I'm not sure I would completely trust the Mediterranean to produce pollution-free salt for cooking, but I don't mind washing dishes with it!

Pretty easy. I took this a step further to determine cost and savings based on what I usually buy which is whatever thing is on sale at the local Costco as we won't shop at Walmart.

Full disclosure, I am using Amazon products which are readily ordered and I am using affiliated links. So if you order anything, I get a bit of monetary reward for my work in making this easy for you. It was also the basis of having numbers to determine the cost.

The table below shows how I worked it up. I found some products on Amazon Canada which seemed up to the quality, and were more cost-effective than others. I figured out using ChatGPT how to resolve the packeged amount into cups which relate to the recipe. Then I took the highest number of 22 which is when you put all that stuff together, is the maximum number of recipe batches you can make.

Spoiler alert, you can make about 1000 dishwasher doses for about $100 CAD. That's 10 cent per. The tabs at Costco round our about 30 cents per, and some research into cheaper less effective stuff went down to 16 cent per.

So no matter what, you get a cheaper product, which is environmentally friendly.

Note: The table should appear below in this web page. If it does not, you can download the recipe calculations in Excel format here.