Offbeat CFJ article on dishwasher soap and the environment rated among nation’s best in environmental writing.
A tongue-in-cheek but informative article about the controversy over phosphate-free dishwasher soap has earned the Center for Justice an Award of Merit from Global Environmental Communications, LLC, in the organization’s 2009 ECO Awards for Excellence in Environmental Communications.
The piece, “Confessions of a Soap Sample Boy,” was written by CFJ’s Communications Director Tim Connor. It is among
seven Awards of Merit given for individual articles. The top Award, the Award for Excellence, went to Lauren Pinch with the Associated Builders and Contractors in Arlington, Virginia.
Connor has won three prestigious national journalism awards for his investigative reporting for Camas Magazine and KXLY-TV but this is his first national award piece for environmental writing.
Excerpt from “Confessions of a Soap Sample Boy”
This problem is so complicated that it can give a person a brain cramp because so much of what causes the chronic low dissolved oxygen is related to past and present decisions that are nearly impossible for any one person to affect. But there is one thing you and I can do about it, today, that we know makes a difference. We can do our dishes without using the phosphate-laden dishwasher soaps that have been pulled from shelves in Spokane.
Some will think I’m naively out of touch with domestic realities. I dispute this. You see, I’ve been in kitchens where a few dishes in a load emerge with the little gobs or flakes of what looks to be blow dried collard greens or cheese on them. I’ve heard the yelps and expletives this causes. It’s hard. It can upset the tenuous emotional warmth of an evening or the morning after Thanksgiving. I get that.
But let’s put it in some perspective. We’re not talking here about the need to run to Post Falls to load up on a life-saving antibiotic for your kid. It’s just the dishes, for goshsakes. The worst that’s going to happen, if your soap doesn’t quite work, is you’re going to have to pre-wash a little better, or worse, wash some dishes by hand. And the latter is not a horrible thing. It can even make you a better lover, spouse, and writer. (Don’t scoff, I’ll get back to this.) But that’s my synopsis about why this story has another side to it, or at least how it should be looked at given that the realm of choice and consequences goes well beyond the kitchen. Those little pipes that take waste water away actually do go somewhere. What goes around, comes around.
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