Why you should never wash your dishes by hand

Oct 3, 2015

You're wasting water

For a lot of people, the typical after-meal routine includes rinsing off the dishes before they're placed in the dishwasher. Well, you should stop doing that.

First of all, you're wasting water. That pre-rinse uses a lot of water for something the dishwasher is going to do all over again -- and much more efficiently.

"Pre-rinsing your dishes in the sink can easily waste more than 6,000 gallons of water per household each year," according to Consumer Reports.

You can try to do it more efficiently than the dishwasher, but...

“In order to wash the same amount of dishes that can fit in a single load of a full size dishwasher and use less water, you would need to be able to wash eight full place settings and still limit the total amount of time that the faucet was running to less than two minutes,” Jonah Schein, a technical coordinator in the EPA’s WaterSense program, told The Washington Post.

Washing dishes by hand doesn't make them cleaner

The sponge you use to wash dishes by hand is probably really dirty. In fact, it's likely dirtier than your toilet seat. Sponges get wet, stay wet and collect bacteria. One survey that studied kitchen sponges and dish towels found that 10% of them contained Salmonella. To clean a sponge, just throw it in the microwave for 30 seconds. Even without all those dirty dishes piled in it, your kitchen sink likely isn't very clean either. "There's more E. coli in a kitchen sink than in a toilet after you flush it, according to Dr. Charles Gerba, a microbiologist and professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Read more: Three things you should probably clean more often

"The sink is a great place for E. coli to live and grow since it’s wet and moist. Bacteria feed on the food that people put down the drain and what’s left on dishes in the sink. That’s probably why dogs drink out of the toilet—because there’s less E. coli in it.”

Let the dishwasher do its job

You have a dishwasher for a reason.

When you wash dishes by hand, you probably use lukewarm water -- so you don't burn your hands off -- which is understandable. But when you do that, you aren't really cleaning much. Our hands can't take the heat required to truly clean dishes to the point of being bacteria free. Dishwashers use water that's around 140 to 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

If you don't have a dishwasher...

There are ways to making hand-washing the dishes a cleaner and more eco-friendly process.

First, clean the sink. "Clean the sink basin with a disinfectant product made for the kitchen," says Dr. Gerba. "Vinegar and lemon juice can clean some bacteria, but they can't clean really bad pathogens, so the Environmental Protection Agency doesn't recommend using them as an alternative."

And if you want to reduce the amount of water used, here are some ways to make hand-washing more eco-friendly.