Prior to my girlfriend visiting her family for a month over the holidays, she was nice enough to run the dishwasher, which was filled with a normal proportion of dishes, cups, pots and utensils. Being on the lazy side, I left the clean items in the dishwasher and used what I needed. Since I don’t cook, I ate out just about every night. But every night before I go to sleep, I drink a cup of Metamucil. To make a long story short (I know, too late), I ran out of cups and spoons so it was time for a new wash.
I started taking out the clean items from the dishwasher and then stopped. Why? I was still going to use the same amount of detergent and same amount of water. So why remove the clean dishes? No harm in cleaning them again, right? But it just seemed wrong to unnecessarily wash clean dishes. On the other hand, I couldn’t think of any reason why it was wrong.
You’re going to have to empty the dishwasher sooner or later anyway. If you do it now, you can buy more cups and spoons and then you don’t have to run the washer that often.
Or just leave the dishwasher alone and reuse the cup and spoon every night.
At a backyard cookout a group of us all agreed that eating hamburger shaped like a hotdog on a hotdog bun, and conversely eating a hotdog that was patty shaped on a hamburger bun were both equally disgusting.
But none of us could explain exactly why.
just run the wash cycle and be done with it, you have probably dripped Metamucil remnants over the clean stuff anyway. But FFS, empty the dishwasher THIS time!
This is sounding kind of “magical thinking” in nature. Laws of contagion, laws of similarity, and so on. To which most of us are not immune.
i.e., would you want to wear one of Adolf Hitler’s pullovers? I wouldn’t. I know that the garment isn’t magically contaminated with Nazi Evil ™ but…I still would feel squeamish about it. Yeah, even if it had been dry-cleaned a dozen times.
The fact that the cup of coffee I just drank contains trillions of molecules of water that once were in George Washington’s blood-stream seems impossible, but, scientifically, it’s certainly true.
What you should have done was drink 14 cups of Metamucil on-the-spot (enough to keep you active for two weeks), using a fresh clean cup out of the dishwasher for each. Then you could put them all back in the washer and run another cycle without feeling guilty over wasting all that water and detergent. Well, for the amount attributable to cleaning all those cups again, at least.
I can’t help but envision a kitchen with two dishwashers: remove clean stuff from the one on the left before placing the freshly-used stuff in the one on the right – and after you’ve filled up the one on the right and had it clean the contents, start placing each plate and utensil back in the one on the left as you remove each item at need.
So there are no drawers, and no cabinets; it’s tailor-made for a lazy bachelor!
EDITED TO ADD: I see that’s already a pre-existing thread. Must’ve spotted it subconsciously!
Or, try this. Keep a tally of each time you or your gf eat off of a plate, or use a spoon or cup or other utensil. Also, keep a tally of each time each of these gets washed. (For plates, you have room to write the tallies on the bottom, using waterproof ink of course. For smaller items, maybe set up an Excel spreadsheet.)
By keeping track this way, if you wash a plate two (or several) times in a row without eating off of it (because it happened to be convenient to do so, or whatever reason), you can then eat off the plate just as many times in a row without having to wash it. (Cleanliness is conserved.)
Similarly, that our skin is covered with bugs we can’t see, especially on our faces. I mean, seriously, they’re eating and sleeping and having sex on our faces and there’s nothing we can do about it. What the eff, get off my face.
hmmm…well, one thing that seems wrong, but apparently isn’t:
There’s a guy somewhere on this planet who doesn’t cook, doesn’t empty the dishwasher, doesn’t know how to wash a cup or spoon… and has a girlfriend who wants to live with him.
(And a tip of the hat to ya—you’re a far luckier man than I ! )
It’s kinda 1st world privilege to, without a second thought, needlessly waste the world’s energy and resources because you’re too lazy to shift some dishes. That’s what’s wrong with it.
There are places in the world, many in fact, where people are right now burying their children from a lack of access to clean water. Just as there are people shivering in the cold for lack of heating fuel.
It’s your privilege to squander heating fuel and clean water because you have an unending supply. Nobody can stop you and it’s not a crime. So…enjoy, I guess.
People like to carry on that environmentalists expect too much when they attempt to get people in the first world to change their lifestyles.
When, in reality, the change they’d most like to see is for people stop being wasteful.
But, hey, Screw Them, you’re in America, you go ahead and needlessly waste the world’s resources willy nilly, as is your God given right.
Nobody expects you to give up your car or hot showers etc. But consider engaging some greys cells when it comes to completely needless waste, in future!
I’m pretty sure that if OP had realized that by emptying the dishwasher, and only washing the dirty ones, the amount of energy saved would have kept the children alive, and warm in the other country he would have emptied it.
I grant that a trillion water molecules is a tiny tiny tiny portion of a cup of coffee (a quick calculation is about 1x10^25 water molecules in a cup, and a trillion is only 1x10^9, so very roughly ten billion trillion trillion water molecules are in a cup.)
But I think your example is off by many orders of magnitude. Water molecules are not indivisible, after all: they can be created as the byproduct of reactions and destroyed as the result of other reactions. To somehow be confident that trillions of the exact same water molecules from George Washington, specifically, ended up in your cup is pushing it. There were nearly a billion human beings alive during Washington’s lifetime, and that was over two hundred years ago.
It’s possible, I suppose, that SOME water molecules in your cup were once in the blood of the Father of Our Country. But unless you have an Edward Cullen thing going, I doubt you’ve consumed trillions in any one sitting.
The major point is that the number of molecules of water in a cup is so much larger than the number of cups in the entire earth’s aquasphere, as to make my number many orders of magnitude too small!
One problem, though, is in the definition of a “specific water molecule.” I consider it “the same” molecule, even if it has swapped one hydrogen atom for another, without actually having been decomposed. (Abraham Lincoln’s axe.) If you hold that it has to retain the exact same two hydrogen atoms, then, certainly, the lifespan of the molecule is vastly less than it is by my standard.
I was able to find an internet note on the first model of molecular change– counting it as a “new” molecule if it swaps out a Hydrogen atom. However, I was not able to find any data on how long a molecule lasts, on the average, before it breaks up entirely, no longer being a water molecule at all.
I did find someone who alludes to the debate between these models of molecular decay – Are We Drinking Dinosaur Pee? – and he admits he doesn’t know the “half life” of a water molecule using the second definition. However, he concludes that it is large enough that, yes, we are drinking Dinosaur Pee – and thus, yes, my morning coffee has a whole shitload of George Washington’s blood fluids.
I think you are relying on the OP’s claim that it would take the same amount of detergent & water. But I believe that is probably wrong – my dishwasher certainly has cycles for small loads, which use less detergent, water, and energy.
So I think elbows is correct, if a bit hyperbolic: the OP is wasting resources while others on this planet are dying for lack of those resources.
