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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

> 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.

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...)

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