Make:

• Solar power for your electronics gear
• Pedal to the People - 15-person bicycle-truck
• Sustainable building design contest
• Mixing clay plaster and lime paint
• Power Pack - Generating power with the motion of a back pack
• Mario inspired flowerpots ready to bloom

Ah yes... Because I want bugs landing on my dishes from the flowers.

BRILLIANT!

Nice way to kill your plants with surfactants...

huh? you don't rinse your dishes before drying? and really, bugs?

Hey! if you don't rinse your dishes, should take care of the bugs. A common non-poison way of dealing with aphids is to spray soapy water on your plants.

But then again, soapy dishes would have over effects, more with your digestion than the bugs.

diluted dish soap 9 times outta 10 won't kill your plants,it makes it easier for 'really' dry soil to take water instead of beading up on the surface, and really, how many of you are gonna be eatin your houseplants?

Do you have any idea what sort of bacteria and bacterial spores are found in soil? You really don't want your dishes anywhere near your houseplants!

Do you have any idea where most of your food comes from, rehorstmark?!?

1. The soap would be getting into your body not through the plant, but from the plate. Rinse your dishes, and you don't have to worry about the laxative properties of soap.

2. The dishrack is ABOVE the soil, not IN it. Besides, unless you fertilize your plants with night soil (look it up if you don't know what it means), there's not enough harmful bacteria in potting soil to harm anyone.

3. What bugs do you have hanging around your house? A housefly isn't going to hang around plants unless there's reason to (see 2, above), and bees aren't too likely to hang out near garbage.

I think it's an awesome way to conserve our dwindling water supplies.

Yes, I know where food comes from. I also know that is has to be clean if eaten raw or cooked in order to be safe. Do you know how E. coli O157:H7 gets into people? By eating raw vegetables that have not been cleaned adequately. C. botulinum and several other species that cause food-borne (or dirty-dish borne) illnesses are commonly found in soil and they cause a lot of misery to large numbers of people each and every day.

I repeat, houseplants and the dishes you eat off of do not belong in close physical proximity.

myrkul,
if you want to conserve water, why not just collect water from the pan under your dish drying rack and pour it on your plants? How much are you going to conserve this way, 5 gallons per year?

The media has people feeling guilty about "wasting" a gallon of water that drips off their dishes as they dry and has them believing that they're doing something to save the planet by recovering that gallon of water. How much water is wasted by letting dish water drip down the drain compared to the amount that is wasted watering a golf course?

You need to develop some sense of proportion about the levels of waste involved and the payoff resulting from the different means of conservation. Focus your energy on the big wastes and the big payoffs. After the big problems have been tackled, focus your attention on the little ones.

rehorstmark----dude wherever you got your info on O157 was wrong----It doesn't come from dirt, it comes from cow sh#*, otherwise known as dung. I don't have cows roaming around my place and unless you are even creepier than I think you are, you probably don't either. All those spinach outbreaks etc----are from cows and feral pigs, running about the mountain regions of California. In case you are wondering I have a PhD in microbiology and I actually research the diarrheal mechanisms of EHEC and EPEC for a living (Specifically ion transport and paracellular trafficking via the tight junctions in intestinal epithelia). Now then most people buy bags of miracle grow potting soil for their house plants, those bags have been sterilized so that no weed seeds, germs, etc. are in there to kill off you plants so you're pretty much not going to get hurt by being in remote proximity to soil. As a childhood friend of mine used to put it, God made dirt and dirt don't hurt. While my religious beliefs don't fall along those lines, I'd say she was right on.

I'm well aware of where the E. coli comes from. I'm not so sure about dirt in a pot. I would prefer to err on the safe side than discover that the soil came from elsewhere or maybe got mixed with nonsterile soil. Plenty of people fill their flower pots from backyard compost heaps. I'm not so sure I'd trust a potting soil company to fully sterilize soil either. All the veggies that make people sick are supposd to be clean, too, yet they manage to cause plenty of illness.

All that aside, it is a very silly way to try to recycle water.

PS- it's a good idea to keep your toothbrush well away from your toilet. Flushing can aerosolize some of water (and the stuff that's in it).

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