TIME Magazine highlights the Spokane River and Rachael Paschal Osborn’s work in securing the nation’s first state ban on phosphates in dishwasher soap.

Rachael Paschal Osborn
Five years ago, as Spokane River paladin Rachael Paschal Osborn was leading the fight to solve the river’s notoriously thorny dissolved oxygen problem, she frequently quoted Woody Allen to her co-workers and allies.

“Eighty percent of success is just showing up,” she would say. And show up she did, from one end of the state to the other, often with trays and packages of soap. Dishwasher soap. Phosphorus-free dishwasher soap, to be precise. The object lesson at work was that there was something that everybody with a dishwasher could do to make the Spokane River cleaner. They could wash their dishes in soap that would not cause phosphate to flow down the drain in waste water. Even in relatively small amounts, phosphate contaminated waste water, once it reaches the river, becomes fertilizer for the algae blooms, which in turn causes the low dissolved oxygen condition that is harmful to fish and other aquatic life.
In mid-November, TIME Magazine featured the Spokane River and Paschal Osborn in a story entitled: Greener Dishwashing: A Farewell to Phosphates. The story reports on the Spokane River challenge and presents the 2006 ban on phosphate-containing dishwasher soap (implemented this year) as the harbinger of a national shift. As TIME reports, since the 2006 bill in Washington, fifteen other states have followed Washington’s lead in banning the sale of phosphate containing dishwasher soaps.
For more on the story behind the Washington law and Paschal Osborn’s work on the issue on behalf of the Sierra Club, go here, and here.