There is soap in the kitchen that you use to wash all of your dishes. It is also full of chemicals that although you may wash off of your dishes, will no doubt leave chemical residue behind to get onto the food and drink that you use your dishes for.
You are then ingesting those chemicals.
Dish soaps can have chemicals that may be harmful to you. There may be alternative products available that are more safe.
Let’s look at a common dish soap and see if there are any harmful ingredients.
Does dish soap have harmful ingredients?
We are going to look at Dawn Ultra dishwashing liquid, original scent.
I use EWG.org to look up products to see the ratings they have based on the research done on the ingredients in each product.
So let’s sketch a look and see what rating this soap has.
The Dawn Ultra dish soap has a D rating on a scale from A to F. So a D rating is almost the worst rating.
It shows no data for most of the ingredient concerns but do not take that at face value. There is another way to find data about those health concerns.
You can click on each ingredient individually and then click on “learn more about this ingredient.”
Most of the ingredients have a score of D or C.
If we take a look at C9-11 PARETH-8 in the learn more about this ingredient section we can see the data.
In this section there is data for some concern about cancer, reproductive toxicity, eye and respiratory irritation from many different sources.
It is the same concern for the next ingredient as well which is DECETH-8.
The reason this ingredient has the same exact concerns in the data because the health concern does not come from the ingredient itself but from ethylene oxide and 1,4 dioxane.
These are the chemicals that could be found in these two ingredients that are harmful and are linked to health issues.
Companies do not test for these chemicals in the ingredients they use to make sure they are safe.
And if they did then it does not mean they test regularly and they could be contaminated at some point later.
Both of these harmful chemicals are produced as byproducts during the manufacturing process of these two compounds ingredients.
They are byproducts of the manufacturing process of other ingredients as well.
We cannot trust companies to say that these contaminants are not in their products.
If they are in dish soap they we could possibly be ingesting the residue from it getting onto the food that we are eating off of the dishes.
This a a concern when we use products that are made with synthetic man-made chemicals and not something that is actually plant-based.
The health concerns from some of the other ingredients from the Dawn dish soap are endocrine disruption, contamination from heavy metals and formaldehyde.
Is there any alternative products available that would not have these health concerns in our dish soap?
Action steps to avoid harmful ingredients in dish soap
There are alternative products available that have a better rating at EWG and that do not have harmful chemicals.
ECOS Dish Soap, Free & Clear has an A rating on EWG and the majority of the ingredients in this product are plant-based.
9 Elements Liquid Dish Soap, Lemon Scent has an A rating on EWG and it uses a natural essential oil lemon scent that is not toxic.
Conclusion
There can be some harmful chemicals in certain dish soaps that we may not want to use because they can get on our dishes and then we can subsequently be ingesting them.
Alternative products are available and can be a good idea to use instead of using other products with more harmful ingredients.