SPOKANE, WASH. — By day, Patti Marcotte is a working mom -- dealing with the balancing act created by a 5-year-old daughter, a demanding job, a split-level house and a willful boxer puppy.
Come the post-dinner hour, however, Marcotte begins operating in the shadowy world of smuggled soap.
Spokane County in July adopted a near total ban on sales of water-softening phosphates in dishwasher detergent -- the first in the nation -- in an attempt to slow the flood of pollutants that is sucking oxygen out of the endangered Spokane River, smothering its fish.
The problem, Marcotte and many of her neighbors say, is that most low-phosphate detergents are wimps when it comes to fighting greasy pots and spaghetti-crusted plates. So she has become a detergent outlaw, driving 45 minutes across the Idaho state line to pick up secret stashes of the old, bad dish cleansers: the brutish Cascades, the muscular Electrasols.
"With the 'green' stuff, the dishes come out with a real slippery texture -- like somebody poured a cup of grease in some dishwater -- and a white film. Just really gross," Marcotte said. "And then the food gunk just mixes around the dishwasher and when it stops, it just settles on whatever's there. I mean, it's bad."
Retailers in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, say the sight of apologetic but defiant Washingtonians loading their carts with dishwasher detergent is becoming increasingly common. "We go, 'Are you coming from Spokane?' And they kind of chuckle and say, 'Yeah,' " said Donna Wilkinson, an assistant manager at Costco.
For those inclined to chuckle at the travails of distant, desperate people with dirty dishes, consider this: The detergent industry has pledged to make every automatic dishwashing soap sold in the U.S. and Canada nearly phosphate-free by mid-2010.
With 12 states -- including Washington -- phasing in low-phosphate laws by the end of next year and four others considering them, industry officials say they are gearing up to produce a new generation of products that will clean dishes while not harming lakes and streams. (The California Legislature passed a phosphate law last year, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it.)
The pledge marks a significant turnaround for an industry that until recently not only opposed such laws but also warned that many phosphate-free dishwashing detergents didn't work the way consumers expected them to.
