Who needs a phone book these days?
"I find it hard to think of a more pointless exercise than the annual delivery of what we used to call the telephone book," a Westmere reader writes. "Mine just arrived and went, as it does every year, straight into the recycling. I have tried to get our address taken off the delivery list, to no avail. Does anyone use them in a smartphone world? By my calculation, it puts 350 tonnes into the waste stream each year. Perhaps the company that produces them could devote the resources to a website that works."
Don't rinse dishes
If you rinse your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher, Carolyn Forte, director of the Cleaning Lab at the Good Housekeeping Institute, says you should stop. Apparently dishes need to be dirty for the dishwasher detergent to do its job, because the enzymes in it are designed to attach themselves to food particles. Without food, the enzymes have nothing to latch on to. Today's dishwashers are more savvy than those in grandma's day. They have advanced sprayer technology and sensors that detect how dirty your dishes are, says Forte. Plus pre-rinsing at the sink (and washing dishes by hand, for that matter) seriously wastes water and energy.
