Are dishwashers more environmentaly friendly than hand washing?

You _can_ save more energy washing by hand, as long as you're careful about it. Consider that dishwashers consume energy from 3 main sources: heating the water used for washing, spraying the water around and pumping it out after each cycle, and blowing hot air through to dry the dishes. Of these, heating the water has the largest energy cost (up to 80% of the total). If you wash a full load of dishes by hand in a tub of soapy water, rinse using warm or cool water and air-dry, you'll certainly do better than the dishwasher in total energy use. The website below estimates you can use about half as much water with careful hand-washing, which means _better_ than half as much energy use (since hand-washing doesn't use _any_ energy for pumps or heating/blowing air). http://frugalliving.about.com/od/appliances/a/dishwash022602.htm (I've read a number of articles on this subject and there are a lot of different opinions. I'm still open to the possibility that I could be mistaken, but for now, I believe that frugal hand-washing can beat a dishwasher.) The hitch, of course, is being able to hand-wash the equivalent of a full dishwasher load in one session. A standard dishwasher is designed to hold 8 place settings; a large family will generate that much in one day, but a smaller family might need 2 days or more to fill a dishwasher, and a single person might need a whole week. To reap the benefits of hand washing, you'd need to accumulate the same volume of dishes that you would otherwise be loading into your (hypothetical) dishwasher...so you'd need to decide whether you're OK with keeping a stack of dirty dishes around for that many days. As it happens, I do use a dishwasher myself. I don't run it until it's full, which can take several days; I use the shortest "light wash" cycle, and I don't use hot-air drying.