Eco Friendly Ways to Use Your Dishwasher! 👍

Do you have a dishwasher at home? If so, how often do you use it? Do you use it more than washing by hand? Personally, I don't mind doing the washing up (we don't really do it that often, we use our dishwasher) but I know others who hate it. Well, you may be happy to know using a dishwasher can be more environmentally friendly than your usual chore. Can be. You need to use it in a proper way for it to be. Here are some rules you should follow:

1. Scrape all left over food on your plate into the compost bin (food that hasn't been touched could be eaten the next day) instead of putting it straight into the dishwasher and clogging up the drains or wasting more water by rinsing them before.
2. Make sure your dishwasher is completely full before running a cycle.
3. Use the Eco cycle if there is one, or the coolest cycle possible 
4. Run it in the middle of the night to use the most of greener electricity (I'll explain that in another post).

There are also ways you can make the washing up more eco friendly if you don't have a dishwasher. They're mostly the same, for example: 

• Scrape all food into the compost bin before washing
• Make sure you have a full load (or a lot) of dishes to wash before running warm - not hot - water. 

But there are also other things like:

• Run half a basin of cold water to dip the bubbly dishes into when you're done (instead of running them under a stream of more water).
• Wash less grubby dishes first (like glasses and cutlery) and then the dirtier dishes like plates and bowls. This makes sure you don't need to run more water to make it cleaner. 

An average household could use up to 30 litres a week if their washing up and rinsing is done under a running tap. You can use much less water if you don't run the tap for so long; every minute a running tap could waste a week's worth of drinking water (8-12 litres). 

Thank you for reading this post, I hope you liked it. I got most of these facts from This Book Is Not Rubbish, which I've mentioned before. See you next Sunday!

Violet

         xxx