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Comment by wobbly_bush | Hacker News Reader

Is my reading of the summary correct that it is only (or mainly?) talking about rinse aid and not about the detergent?

Rinse aid and detergent both have the same active, harmful ingredient: sulfates aka AES aka surfactants. The difference is that detergent gets rinsed off, while rinse aid IS the rinse (vs plain non-aided water).

It's not sulfates, it's ethoxylated alcohols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethoxylation

It's both, and they work the same way on the gut

That may be true, but your assertion that rinse aids have sulfates is incorrect. All the ones I've looked at have nonionic surfactants that are not sulfates.

(There are also sulfates that are aren't AES, such as sodium sulfate, which appears in many powdered dishwasher detergents. I doubt this has the same effect, so it's incorrect to just blame "sulfates".)

I think you need to learn the gloriously liberating feeling of admitting you were wrong.

many surfactants are not sulfates

many sulfates are not surfactants

none of the numerous meanings in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES are in any way related to surfactants or sulfates

many sulfates and surfactants are not 'harmful' as generally understood (though there's probably a lethal dose of any of them)

why are you posting this misinformation here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethoxylation#Alcohol_ethoxysul...

while it is nice that you have cleared up what you meant by 'aes' (a third category which excludes not only most sulfates and most surfactants but even the most common surfactant that is also a sulfate, sds) you have not answered my question

why are you posting this egregious misinformation here

Interestingly enough there was ANOTHER study where they looked at safety of plastic bottles. And then they discovered that plastic bottles absorbed WAY more detergent in the dishwasher than glass or metal and whatnot. This was not even the original intention of their study.

So basically do not dishwash plastic stuff.

Yah, it seemed the same to me.

I don't use rinse aid, never have, you don't actually need it, you can just let the dishes air dry for slightly longer.

If you have hard water then soften it, rather than use a rinse aid.

It is talking about professional dishwashers like the ones used in restaurants. So if you dine out on a regular basis you're probably getting exposed to this stuff even if you don't use it at home.

PS I have no chemical expertise, but the article singles out alcohol ethoxylates as the cause of this damage. And while I don't use rinse aid in my home dishwasher, my Cascade dishwasher pods list "Isotridecanol Ethoxylated" as an ingredient, which may be one of these substances? At least this gets rinsed off, though I doubt it gets rinsed completely.

Indeed, the study seems to conclude that it's not rinsed off completely and residue remains on the "clean" dishes.

If I remember chem class correctly, -nol indicates an alcohol (ethanol, methanol...)

Many years ago I worked as a skivvy in a hotel kitchen. We never used any detergent for the crockery, it just used extremely hot water. The dishes seemed very clean and they dried very rapidly.

How... many... years ago? When I started cooking professionally in the 80s three-stage hand wash had already been required by health codes everywhere for decades. I've seen all kinds of shit but every kitchen at least has the setup and chemicals for that for health inspections if nothing else. In practice even the sketchiest restaurants will have quats even if they only fill it once a day.

GP is talking about a commercial dishwasher. You can't hand wash hot enough -- you'd get serious burns. So anything you hand wash needs the three-stage wash, rinse, sanitize process with detergent and chemical sanitizer.

Oh you're right, I misread it. Thanks.

Yep. If the water is hot enough you don't need chemical detergent or sanitizer. But we're talking about water that is almost boiling -- you'd only find dishwashers that hot in a commercial kitchen.

I wonder if the sanitize button on a residential unit is good enough. (The machines in the article are pressurized, but that is a new technology. The GP post’s machines were probably older.)

I think that is for the final rinse. It's probably hot enough to sanitize but doubt that the dishes would be really clean without using detergent.

Commercial dishwashers don't wash the dishes with soap, rather they blast them with water, and then sanitize with bleach.

Home dishwashers attempt to remove food residue with enzymes (also no soap).

If the purpose of the substance is to make the dishes dry faster it makes sense that it would not be fully rinsed off at the end of the cycle. In theory you would hope that they would evaporate off of the dishes, but that leads to air quality issues, so all in all these rinse aids seem problematic.

> At least this gets rinsed off

It does not get rinsed off. The hope is that it drips off the dishes, but some will remain and then dry. Does this ingredient dry? I don't know.

Yes, but they also didn't study how this affects people---their work was all /in vivo/, and they call for more study at the end.

I think you mean in vitro. There are no animal trials at all.

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