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Originally Posted by Skybird
Overfertilisation of soil and water, and collapsing rivers and lakes, both happening on great scale - that was what the excessive emission of phosphates had helped. Banning them was the right and necessary thing to do.
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And by what measure do you assume that this is so, Sky? Phospates are fertilizers and their principle source is agricultural use, not detergents. A great deal of care is taken to ensure that they do not end up in potable water sources, (i.e. dishwater) but virtually nothing is done to reduce the impact of agricultural runoff, which ends up in lakes and reservoirs. In fact, their use is subsidized in most industrialized countries because banning high-gain agribusiness tends to get unpopular when food prices rise or people starve.
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Overfertilisation still is a big problem due to the intense agriculture being run on smaller and fewer farms that are expected to produce more food, and thus use more fertilizer.
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This is true.....in poor areas. Modern agribusiness has no such problem. In the wealthy "breadbasket" nations, particularly the US, agriculture is a science. Corporations extract vast amounts of productive crops from arable land year after year with no ill effect by using good land management and engineered crops.
Feel free to look up crop yields if you're not convinced. Agribusiness provides a vast surplus; so much so that the aforementioned nations literally give it away, no matter what the conditions are. The only exceptions are in the case of corn-based products, which have been hijacked by state initiatives to promote ethanol use, and sugarcane products, which have been similarly abused by the state to promote the use of corn.
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But at least an easy to avoid factor has been removed.
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No, all that has been removed is a fairly irrelevant factor. I don't even need to do any research to know that dishwasher runoff contributes very little to freshwater usage, and that it passes through munincipal filters in every case where there might be someone who can afford a dishwasher.
This is nothing more than a politcal move to convince people like you that something is being done to preserve the environment whilst simultaneously satisfying people like me by not interfering with the dynamics of modern agribusiness.
in addition, as is always the case with such legislation, what you don't see is the inherent unintended effect. All you see is the ideal. What do you think people will do when their detergent doesn't work anymore? The article itself should have made it clear. They'll buy new dishwashers or sue, or just use vast amounts of lousy detergents, or use more dishwater. None of these things are productive by any measure.
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No dishwasher in my household. But still I manage to survive.
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In what way, if any, does that justify anything? People dont want to just survive, they want something better. That's what drives the the technological innovation behind your own ability to question such things on a fascinating piece of technology, and mine as well.
I'll discuss the philosphical implications of the argument later if you wish, but I trust that I've made my point.