Seventh Generation dishwashing detergent: good green cred, bad smell

In my opinion, going green, shouldn't send you into the red, or make you blue. But that's kinda how I felt after trying Seventh Generation dish washing detergent. At some point after we started using it, there would sporadically be a really bad smell when we opened the dishwasher in the morning. Sometimes washing the load again would make it go away, sometimes it wouldn't.

After about three-quarters of the box we figured out that the culprit was eggs. If we had scrambled eggs or even baked a cake with eggs one day and then put the bowl that had contained raw eggs in the dishwasher with Seventh Generation detergent, the whole load came out smelling bad the next morning. Our best guess is somehow the soap didn't work to break down the egg and instead the egg got heated up and spread around everywhere and dried smelling really bad.

Hopefully this is some weird idiosyncrasy with our dishwasher, but I thought I'd post it in case someone else is trying to get to the bottom of intermittently bad smelling wash loads.

We went back to Cascade for the meantime since it never had that problem. But next up for us is trying Trader Joe's detergent as we try to get greener in our cleaning supplies. High hopes here, it was rated really highly by Consumer Reports.

The whole thing reminded me of one of A's favorite "man on the street" interviews in The Onion. The question was something like "What efforts are you making to be better to the environment?" And one of the "respondents" said, "My wife keeps buying these green cleaning products, but I think green means you have to use twice as much to do the same thing." I think that was unfortunately true with some of the early products and some people - like A - are jaded.

But slowly I've been convincing him otherwise. My latest favorite find is Biokleen dishwash liquid.