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.
It’s Spokane County Washington’s dirty little secret -- contraband smuggling housewives.
Spokane County 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.
This has turned Marcotte and some of her neighbors into detergent outlaws, driving 45 minutes across the Idaho state line to pick up secret stashes of the old, bad dish cleanser: the brutish, outlawed Cascade.
Surely they have changed this law in Spokane County Washington by now. If not, County residents are probably breaking the law if the dishwashing soap they use actually gets their dishes clean.
It’s just a matter of time before pictures of Cascade boxes covered with big red X’s show up on TreeHugger’s website.
Link
A picture of my cave
..
..
