Our colleagues down the hall at Consumer Reports are fighting for a cause that might not seem all that important…especially not in comparison with pressing policy issues like antibiotics-laden meat or the looming merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Yet this issue does lead to the waste of large amounts of water, energy, and time. It doesn’t have to be this way.

We last addressed this issue two and a half years ago, but if your household prerinses dishes before putting them in a recently manufactured dishwasher, you have wasted as many as 15,000 gallons of water since then. No, really.

As part of their ongoing crusade against pre-rinsing, our colleagues have issued a Thanksgiving-season challenge to readers to stop rinsing their dishes “cold turkey” for one cycle. If you find that some dishes come out still soiled, then those are the ones you will have to pre-rinse in the future. Make sure that you’ve loaded and lined up everything correctly, make some adjustments next time, and then use the several minutes that you save by not pre-rinsing to … I don’t know, check your favorite blogs again after dinner, or something equally important.

Don’t waste time and money prerinsing your dishes [Consumer Reports]

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