• Some dish washing water in a 6 litre bucket on my kitchen bench
How may we show love in the kitchen sink for fish in the ocean?
Easy.
Here’s how to put dish water to good use.
Keep it for your garden. By spreading it here and there the soap and food (that once was soil, that became food) can be turned back into into soil, tree and plant growth and more soil life.
Here’s how.
This photo show some dish washing water in a 6 litre bucket on my kitchen bench.
The water in the photo contains left overs from cooking lasagne and cleaning up dishes. There are: lemon quarters turned greyish after about 4 or so turns in the dish washer where I put them to add lemon acid to help clean the dishes and by now they’re ready for the compost; left over milk from making a white sauce for the lasagne; left over white sauce; rinse water from the saucepans, dishes, + whatever.
• Keep a container in your sink for dish, pot rinsing
Yes, I’ve ‘washed up, but. When we’re ‘washing up’, we’re not, really. We’re washing down into the ocean and rivers.
Here, though, the rinsed dishes are in the dishwasher and that water empties into the recycled sewage system in my backyard and comes back to flush the toilet and wash the clothes.
The rinse water is put into the house and road gardens.
• Fresh, used lemons provide acid, perfume for 2 - 4 machine cycles
I wear a glove to keep the food in as I tip rinse water into the garden out back or front of my house.
• Pouring dish washing water onto plants - here, a Feijoa tree
After that, the food, paper and such like left in the bottom of the bucket goes into the compost.
• Left over veggies, lemons greyish after the dishwasher + this n that
Worms and little critters love it and make soil which makes fruit, veggies, tree growth.
• Into the compost it goes, “Yum”, say the worms and little critters
ª “Yum”, and, “Ahhh” - the joy of connecting with Earth, here in the street where I live
Will this eventually kill my garden and plants, or yours?
No. Since the 1980s most kitchen water is bucketed to the garden where grows a healthy curry tree, a cumquat tree, a water gum, water lilies in the pond.
There is no “waste’ water at my house. (There is no such thing as ‘waste’, just a failure of human imagination. Ask Nature - she gets it.)
For the rest of the house ‘waste’, all sewage is kept on site, re-used to flush the toilet and in the clothes washing machine.
Since 1996 no sewage has left my Chippendale house, just near Central Railway Station in Sydney. Anyone can do this. Over 3 million Australians treat sewage using similar systems to mine.
But, if there are over 5 million people in Sydney, about 1.3 billion litres of sewage has been, and is being, pumped into the Pacific Ocean each day.
That’s 1,300 olympic-sized (ie 1 million litres) swimming pools each day.
Since disconnecting from the city’s indefensible polluting sewage system in 1996, the house has kept over 2.5 million litres of recycled sewage in about 5 square metres here in a soil that’s a mix of clay lenses and imported soil. And no sewage or water bills have been paid, saving over $1500 a year. (Plus, there’s the pleasure of showing respect and love for the fish.)
A soil test by one of Australia’s leading soil scientists, Simon Leake, showed that the treated waste water “ . . . are not having a long term detrimental effect on soil properties”; see, Sustainable House 2 Ed 2010, Michael Mobbs, Choicebooks, p198.
If we let our dish water into the drain that goes into town sewers we kill fish. City kitchen sinks are connected to rivers and the ocean. Rivers and the ocean are for fish, not our dish water.
Multiply my dish water by the 6 or so million kitchen sinks in Sydney where I live, all pouring dishwater into the ocean.
Yes, it goes into ‘treatment’ plants.
But that’s a false and misleading word for what is just filters designed to keep big things out of the sewage so that it doesn’t block holes in the ocean outfall pipes which pour toilet and kitchen waste into the ocean off Sydney far enough out so the poo and gunk doesn’t wash up on beaches and end up on human media, and only makes the news for fish and what’s below the water way out to sea.
Really?
The good news is this destructive abuse of ocean life is something we can easily choose not to be part of.
All we need is a bucket in the kitchen sink, a garden, some compost options and we give some love and respect to the fish (they don’t eat lasagne, I’m guessing).
Still, it makes me think, reading what I’ve just written.
Over 6 million people here, putting excreta into the ocean each day, their dish washing water, too, each excreting about 2 litres of urine a day (is that 12 million litres of urine for the fish each day, or, 12 Olympic sized swimming pools).
Many ways to kill a planet, many to save it - and ourselves. Dishwater is one of them.
Gotta love my dishwater.
We all make such choices.
All lives matter, and fish lives, too.
Where fish go so go we, and our lovely, one and only Earth.