[chiefalchemist]

> When individual components of the rinse aid were investigated separately, alcohol ethoxylates elicited a strong toxic and barrier-damaging effect.

To clarify a bit, it's not professional dishwashers (the machines) but the soap / chemicals used for commercial dishwashing. Minor but important when thinking about the broader problem.

Mind you, it gets diluted but those end up in the water supply, as does many other knows and unknowns. For me, the question has not be what effect does Compound X or Compound Y have individually, but when in the wild what happens when you combine A to Z+? Then what?

[XorNot]

That entirely depends on the stability of the compounds in waste water. They break seem to break down sufficiently quickly[1] that it was evaluated as a potential problem in sampling waste water to even determine their content.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11227547/