You, too, gentlemen.
Posted on 08/22/2010 10:34:20 PM PDT by smokingfrog
Baltimore - A ban that's designed to protect the Chesapeake Bay from a dangerous pollutant went into effect more than a month ago and you may not even noticed. That ban impacts the detergent we all use in our dishwashers. ABC2 News Investigator Joce Sterman explains what's been cut out of the cleaning product and where we found banned items out for sale.
She's got kids, a career and still has to make time to do those households chores. It's obvious Lutherville’s Jenny Atwater is a busy mom with plenty on her plate. She says, “I hate unloading the dishwasher and I really hate unloading the dishwasher and seeing the dishes seem not very clean."
But Atwater has noticed that’s been happening a lot lately. She tells us, "I do notice there tends to be more stuff left with this detergent, just stuff that normally would have been washed away probably."
The dish detergent she's talking about is phosphate free. Jenny made the switch a few months, and chances are so did you, although you probably didn’t even notice. Jenn Aiosa with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation says, "The average consumer doesn't know."
Marylanders may not be aware that automatic dishwasher detergents with phosphorus are now banned in this state and more than a dozen others. The ban is thanks to a law put in place to help get rid of one of the biggest pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. Aiosa explains, "It's really something that's relatively easy in the grand scheme of things for consumers to do but can have an impact."
The impact is something you should already be seeing on store shelves, but it took awhile to put this plan in place. Dennis Griesing with the American Cleaning Institute says, "It was a significant undertaking."
(Excerpt) Read more at abc2news.com ...
Bush's fault.
Don't forget the sludge from Blue Plains. Last I heard it could be spread on fields only 25 feet from the water.
It and other regulations and official meddling killed the river I grew up on (a tributary to the Potomac).
Geesh - is this why I’ve had trouble?
Actually, I’ve had trouble for years. I chalked it up to crappy dishwasher. I’m now using the Cascade packets and they seem to be good. Strangely with traditional “crystals” I had more grit left inside my glasses - sometimes surely “dirt” as opposed to the detergent.
But I digress. I think.
“where we found banned items out for sale.”
Great. Now I will go hoard some. Just like REAL lightbulbs.
“Has anything we have ever done to fix perceived pollution ever done any good”
And that is 1 of the problems - PERCEIVED. I am no expert but overall, I fail to see truth to PREMISES such as “global warming 1deg/100 years = bad” and “Chesapeake Bay = threatened”. They are treated as unquestioned Truth.
You, too, gentlemen.
About 50 years ago the grass’s that grew in the river were so think that boats had trouble getting in and out of those tributaries.
Some intelligent expert found a way to spray the grass’s and kill them.
Those grass’s filtered the water and added oxygen to the water, they gave fish and crabs a place to hide and grow and shed.
Today those grass’ are non-existent, and the river is dying.
The oysters in the Potomac are practically non-existent.The crabs are scarce.The water is so badly polluted and contaminated it is unfit to swim in and a grease slick covers the surface in the creeks. The oysters helped cleanse he water and now there are no oysters.
There were hundreds who earned their living in the waters of the Potomac and the Bay and now tyhere are few, and they are barely eking out a living.
The experts were from the Army COrps of Engineers, and they put the chemical in the water in Chaptico Bay, on the Wicomico River.
The destruction of the aquatic vegetation went well beyone Chaptico Bay, into the Wicomico and Potomac and tributaries later on a rising tide.
Crabbing went from being lucrative to nearly nonexistent, and the removal of the vegetation opened up the bottom to predation by schools of Cow-nosed Ray which wiped out the manoe clams in the Wicomico, eliminating another industry, at least in St Mary's County.
The grasses had also dampened wave energy, and their absence was felt in increased erosion of the shore lines and sedimentation rates offshore, which eliminated many of the oyster beds.
That was accompanied by idiotic legislation which was supposed to preserve the 'scenic' beauty of the Rivers, and forbade homeowners from emplacing new seawalls to counter the increased threat to their property from erosion and the river from subsequent sedimentation. That sedimentation did in most oyster beds, and the sweage effluent from increased development around DC has done much of the rest (fecal colliform contamination).
With little to protect many marshy areas, those wetlands succumbed to active erosion as well, and anyone who knows tidewater estuaries knows those wetlands are the rookeries of life in that environment, but also function to capture many of the finer sediments and toxins in the ecosystem. Without them, normal processes failed, nutrients which might have been used up in the marshes went directly into the river, as did sediments.
The combined effects of tampering, and then preservation of the altered (damaged) ecosystem have been disastrous, and so long as the estuaries are managed by the USACoE as flowing inland rivers, there will be no relief for the ecology there.
It might be able to make a comeback in another 50 years if the grasses were reintroduced, but short of that, the entire tidewater basin ecosystem has become little more than a brackish water ditch and will continue to die.
Crabbing: you could walk 100 yards with a dipnet and have a couple dozen crabs of legal size, on some days I'd catch a dozen soft crabs (just shed) and toss the hard crabs. The soft crabs could be sold for three dollars to local restaurants (keep in mind that was the price of a carton of cigarettes then). It would take less than a half hour to catch them. Now, it would take days.
Clamming: The Wicomico river was home to a softer shelled clam known locally as a 'manoe' clam. In St Mary's County, people dredged them for a living. They are gone from the river now, but not from over harvesting. See the post above for details.
Aquatic vegetation: gone.
Fishing: declined to the point there are few commercial fishermen left. Again, from changes in the ecosystem, destruction of spawning areas and the removal of aquatic vegetation, not from overfishing.
Contamination: fecal colliform and other bacteria are abundant enough that in contrast to spending hours in the water in my childhood, most parents won't let their kids go swimming in the water, and those who fall overboard, especially with an open cut or scrape run the risk of a nasty infection.
Google "Pfisteria". See what this little critter can do for you.
I lived on a tributary to the Potomac in my youth, I saw the changes firsthand. The skipjacks are in museums or gone, and most of the surviving bay-built hulls (workboats for crabbing or oystering) are converted to pleasure craft.
As far as fishing goes, it is nothing like it was 50 years ago. Most 'Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs' come out of Louisiana now.
It takes three yars for a growing oyster to become large enough for sale.
Right now that oyster becomes diseased in that period of time and dies.
There are oysters that frow in 18 months, too soon for the contamination to kill them, but the State refuses to introduce these faster growing oysters. They fear they will take over from the natural oyster that is now dying.If they don’t do something soon there will be neither.
I bow to your knowledge. Interesting info.
But I still question the DEMAND for crabs. I don’t have to tell you it is HUGE here. Noone is as devoted to their particular food as MDers are to crabs. Noone. As a landlubber it just seems to me there are huge demands (our population is much higher, too) that simply can’t be met, leading to “overfishing” and thus to our LA and NC crab-grabs (we just can’t get enough).
As for the other seafood, I’d have no argument because I don’t think any of those are nearly the status of crabs here.
OTOH, whose right is it to tell us what to do or not do? That’s really what it boils down to. And if it means some losses - food, jobs, etc - so be it (yes, I said that). Time marches on and so must society.
Before the aquatic vegetation was killed off, the Crab population was tremendous (as I said, I'd catch a dozen good sized soft crabs in less than a half an hour, tossing the hard crabs out--when I was ten or so-- figure a couple dozen hard crabs, minimum), as were the fish (marketable species) and oysters. Schools of menhaden would change the water to patches of silver evading predator species.
The end of the aquatic vegetation was the change that heralded the demise of the ecosystem there.
The price went up, because there was little to catch.
Populations dropped bacause of the lack of concealment and cover for shedding and higher shallow water wave energy. Similar for fish, only spawning grounds were eroded by the lack of dampened wave energy, and boats which formerly would stay offshore for fear of fouling their props would now come in closer to land, with nothing to dampen the erosive effects fo their wake. Increased turbidity and offshore sedimentation in storm events helped silt in the oyster bars.
The consumer demand remained high, but large numbers of crab were imported from other areas.
I wouldn't eat a raw oyster out of those waters any more, though we did regularly in my youth with no ill effect.
The phosphourous problem, though, stems from related algae blooms (dynoflagellates, actually), which emit a potent neurotoxin which affects people who come in contact with it severely Pfisteria is a nasty little critter, and if you are living where you may come in contact with the water, through recreation or work, it is a concern. Researchers have debated the harmful effects on humans, but the anecdotal material I heard through watermen (people who make their living fishing, oystering, and crabbing) is convincing enough for me. Some people have been severely affected while the PhD's debate it.
Needless to say, it doesn't do the fish any good to be caught in an algae bloom either.
Part of the problem is the sheer volume of effluent from the growth of the Washington DC bedroom communities, which directly relates to another problem we all acknowledge around here--the unbridled growth of the Federal Governement.
It has been my belief that the State wants a river that is pretty to look at, not a functional ecosystem people can make a living off of. When I lived there, watermen were in abundance and we were often looked down upon, despite many of us with early colonial ancestors, because we lived in the sticks.
Now that is eminently desireable property, even if it just has a view of the water and no waterfront, and the selfsame types who looked down on those who lived and made their living there now pay huge sums for houses with piers but remain ignorant of the river their predecessors knew extremely well because their living depended on it.
Thank you for the informative posts. That was interesting about the Army COE and vegetation. Are you saying this occurred only in 1 spot and effectively killed off the entire region? Why did they do that? Was it really just because some people wanted their boats closer or was there something additional?
Try Home Depot.
There may have been other areas where the chemical was used, but Chaptico Bay was notorious for aquatic vegetation fouling boat props, and it was dumped in there.
In a tidewater estuary you have fresh water entering at one end, the other is essentially open to the ocean. More dense (more saline) water at one end effectively traps contaminants in the brackish water in the estuary, which renders the admission of any pollutant more effective than if it went into a flowing river and directly into the ocean where it would disperse. Dispersal rates are slow, and the tributaries to such estuaries are often estauries as well.
The USA CoE had (iirc) taken control of all tidewater areas as navigable waterways. This was about the same time the State of Maryland siezed the Riparian Rights of property owners, even descendents of land grantees living on parts of thsoe land grants.
The Corps' emphasis at the time was on the navigability aspect--being able to move about, not on fisheries. Erie Canal, Mississippi, Potomac below the fall line, it was all the same to them.
While I would like to believe that this was an error in judgement, there were political aspects to eliminating the strenuous objection of watermen to development and channelization projects in the headwaters of the estuary which could be effectively silenced by eliminating their way of life... which cause me to doubt that all aspects of this action were considered with the welfare of the ecosystem in mind.
The damage is done, laws since passed to preserve that, and I doubt it will be undone in my lifetime.
Top loader or front loader?
I’m hanging onto my old washer as long as possible.
BTW, you can buy phosphates to add to your dishwasher detergent.
Front loader. Our old top loader (Amana?) died and we bought a new top loader. It tore our clothes. Returned it and got the Samsung front loader and drier. Love it. Wish we could buy American, but we couldn’t find a product to beat the one we bought. It’s hard to believe it cleans better than any machine we’ve ever had (30 years married) and it uses very little water.
Bought a pair for our daughter, too.
And you said you don’t have the problems with smell or mildew around the seals? And this washer is gentle on your clothing? If so, that sounds interesting.
I just thought of another reason the mildew smell is missing. Our machine has plates made out of silver that release tiny amounts of it into the wash water to kill the mildew.
Here’s a review of one like ours. Maybe not the exact model, but very similar. Reviews are near the bottom of the page.
http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_02634102000P?prdNo=3&blockNo=3&blockType=G3#reviewsWrap
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