Why Everything is Dirtier
I'm old enough to have a vague memory of clothes so white that they were called bright.
This happened despite the absence of additives, the ridiculous varieties of sprays and bottles
and packets that festoon our cabinets today and that we throw into the wash to try to
Boost the Cleaning Power of Apathetic Machines and Increasingly Useless Laundry Soap.
Then the other night, I experienced an amazing blast from the past.
I added a quarter cup of Trisodium Phosphate, TSP, and otherwise treated nothing.
The results were nothing short of mind-boggling.
Everything was clean, clean in a way that I recall from childhood.
Next came my confrontation with the local dry cleaner, which I've used for years.
I explained what happened and how puzzling it is that by using TSP I was able to clean
my clothes more thoroughly and perfectly than his commercial service.
He was not shocked.
He completely agreed, though sheepishly.
I pointed out that TSP, which is a natural element, is amazing not because it cleans
– it needs soap to do its thing – but rather because it rinses, whooshing away all
dirt, oil, stains as well as all leftover detergent.
Bleach whitens, but it ruins fabrics and that's not good.
What is needed is a good rinsing agent that leaves clothes not only perfectly clean, but
also smelling fantastic.
TSP does it, and that's why it has long been an essential ingredient in laundry sub.
Once again, he agreed.
It is not commercially viable, he said.
How can this be?
It is not expensive.
It is freely available at the hardware store in the paint section.
If something works, the laundry service pleases its customers more.
That means more business and higher profits.
Isn't the goal to clean clothes well and do a good job for customers?
Yes, true, he said, but again, TSP is not commercially viable.
He politely deferred all further questions to the Dry Cleaning and Laundry Institute,
whose website provides no information at all to non-members.
However, the Laundry Institute did answer my email.
It is true that trisodium phosphate produces cleaner laundry.
Bingo!
Cleaner laundry!
Cleaner than what?
Anything else!
Not commercially viable means that governments will no longer permit laundries to clean your
shirts.
You can add TSP at home – government hasn't restricted that yet – but commercial houses
cannot.
However, the Laundry Institute did say that there are other ways to achieve a clean shirt.
What are they?
He didn't say.
He said, you will have to do some legwork to find a cleaner that meets your needs.
My needs.
My needs of a clean clothes, same as the laundry needs of the whole of humanity since the beginning
of time.
The whole purpose of laundries is to meet that need.
Here is the problem, however.
The goal of the regulators who regulate the laundry is not to improve your life.
It is to wreck your life a bit at a time by pressing increasing numbers of restrictions
and mandates upon private producers.
One of these mandates has removed TSP from detergent and with catastrophic results.
No one wants to talk about this.
There is a major hush-hush culture here, because business, understandably, doesn't want to
face a consumer backlash, and government doesn't want to acquire the reputation for being the
civilization wrecker that it truly is.
These kinds of regulations are capable of driving an entire industry into the ground,
as people with the intense desire for clean clothes – the very people who are willing
to pay for laundry services – increasingly resort to home cleaning and ironing.
An entire step in the structure of production is eliminated, as laundry autarky replaces
the division of labor, which is the driving force of cooperative human effort.
It's no wonder that the industry wants no talk of this problem.
Its very raison d'être is under attack.
If laundries can't clean clothes, they have to shut down.
Does government care?
If you read between the lines in the almost candid moments of government statements, you
can see what is going on here.
In 2009, Clive Davies, a product engineer with the EPA, granted an interview with the
New York Times that focused on home products.
You might wonder what a product engineer is doing working for the government rather than
the private sector.
This interview shows why.
Only one of the questions he has asked concerned the effect of home products on the environment.
Not even one actually probed the essential question of whether the products actually
work.
Mr. Davies' job is to decide whether to affix a supposedly valued designation to products
designed for the environment.
It's pretty clear that anything that actually cleans, washes or scrubs probably can't earn
the designation.
An empty box that claims to be detergent stands a better chance of gaining the government
seal of approval than a detergent that actually works.
Then we get to the end of the interview, in which he is actually candid about the goal
– the elimination of detergents, meaning the elimination of clean.
Davies concedes that this would be the best possible result.
And what does he recommend instead?
Vinegar and elbow grease – the old-fashioned phrase for scrub harder – thus spake the
government.
That's the future, as these bureaucrats see it.
It's a future of elbow grease, meaning manual labor unassisted by any products of free enterprise
It's like machines and detergents that work.
It's a future in which our clothes are dirty, we have no soap that works to wash our bodies,
our dishes are full of gritty film, our floors are grungy, our windows are smudgy.
Everything more or less stinks like vinegar, our toilets don't work, our trash is hurled
in a pile out back, and vast amounts of our time are spent scrubbing things instead of
of Reading, Singing, Writing or Conversing.
It's a future just like the long ago past, complete with wash tubs, washboards and outhouses,
along with their attendant dirt, disease and deprivation.
My own enlightenment on this issue came within the last year.
Like millions of others, I had forgotten what a clean dish looked like.
The idea was to help the fish in their oxygen competition with algae, even though the household contribution to algae creation is negligible, and the scientific evidence on the issue of algae's effect on fish runs in all directions.
The main issue here is that Americans, Europeans too, are having their living standards systematically
degraded by regulators, who apparently hate our modern conveniences like dishwashers and
want to drive us ever more into an impoverished state of nature.
And don't tell me that phosphate-free dish soap works just as well.
It's a laughable claim.
If you buy some phosphate and add a tablespoon to the load, you enter a new world once the
The
The sales of new home appliances have soared over the last twelve months, according to
industry reports.
The data are not broken down by type, but I am willing to bet that quite a few dishwashers
have been sold to unsuspecting customers, who had no idea that the real problem was
with the detergents, not the machines.
Hardly anyone I have spoken to has understood this problem, but all confirmed the fact that
their dishes are not getting clean.
Getting even less attention was this ban on TSP in laundry soap that took place in the
The Early 1990s, apparently codified in a 1993 law.
The idea, or the excuse, was to stop the increased growth of algae in rivers and lakes.
Phosphate is a fertilizer, too.
Even though there are other ways to filter phosphate, home use contributes virtually
nothing to the alleged problem, and there is no solid evidence that plant growth in
rivers and lakes is a harm at all.
In any case, consumers gradually noticed that stains were becoming more stubborn than ever,
and thus did a huge new range of products start appearing on the market.
These products permit you to treat your clothes before you wash them.
Today our cabinets are filled with such products, spray and wash, bleach pens, stain removers,
boosters of all sorts, and we use them by the gallon.
Does anyone stop and wonder why such products are necessary in the first place?
And if they are so good, why aren't they in the detergent so that the whole of the
load gets clean and not just the treated part?
The reason, most fundamentally, is that the formula for detergent was changed as a result
of government regulation.
The difference wasn't obvious at first, but as time has gone on, other changes began to
take place, like the mandates for machines that use less water, along with mandates for
or tepid temperatures of water in our homes.
In the end, the result is dramatic.
It all amounts to dirty, yellowing clothes.
This is the exact opposite of what we expect in markets, in which products are ever better
and cheaper due to innovation, expansion of the division of labor and competition.
But with government regulation, the results are deliberately the opposite.
Do we pay ever higher prices for shoddy results?
Do we see what is happening here?
I can detect very little in the way of public knowledge, much less outcry.
In the old Cold War days, I recall wondering how it was that the Soviet people could have
put up with state-caused impoverishment for decade after decade, and wondering why people
didn't just rise up and overthrow their impoverishers.
Now I'm beginning to see why.
If this all happens slowly and quietly, there is no point at which the reality of cause
and effect dawns on people.
One final note on my conversation with my dry cleaner.
He gave me the heads up that the main ingredient used for dry cleaning, perchloroethylene,
is not long for this world.
California and New York are considering bans, and the rest of the country comes later.
After that, it's all over, and the last one to leave civilization will have to remember
to shut off the fluorescent light.
This is the whole trajectory of life under government control.
They are the predators, we are their prey.
And this isn't just about clean dishes and clothes.
It applies to every regulation, every tax, every expenditure, every stupid war, and every
monetary manipulation.
Everything government does comes at our expense, and the costs are both seen and unseen.
How much will people put up with until they arrange for the regulators to sleep with the
Issues.