[amluto]

I suspect that the prominent “eww my food/drink smells like chlorine” problem isn’t the tap water. Most soft drink machines have filters that are quite effective at removing chlorine and chloramine.

Restaurants (at least in the US) are, IMO quite sensibly, required to sanitize dishes between uses. This can be done using chlorine or similar chemicals in a “low temperature dishwasher” or using heat in a “high temperature dishwasher”. The former leaves a disgusting residue that can take quite a while to degrade by itself. Those freshly washed, still wet plastic cups next to the drink machine, in a restaurant with a low-temp dishwasher, will make anything you put in them taste like chlorine or, worse, nitrogen chlorides. But they won’t give you nasty foodborne infections.

You can somewhat mitigate this by rinsing the cup before filling it.

(There is also some evidence that rinse aid, which intentionally leaves a residue on cups and dishes, is quite bad for you.)

[meristohm]

We add clear vinegar to the rinse aid container, but only when the particlar detergent (we don't always buy the same one) leaves residue. Seventh Generation (sadly bought out by Unilever) still makes decent detergent. However, what's the environmental impact at and around the factory? I'd rather wash fewer dishes by hand (I've measured, after our old dishwasher broke, and can wash a day's dishes with less than 1.7 gallons of water) than contribute to demand for a manufactured item with non-zero embodied energy and the boxes and boxes of detergent scaled to hundreds of millions, perhaps billions.

[selimthegrim]

Commercial rinse aid

[amluto]

Here’s one of the studies:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009167492...

And here’s the ingredient list for a major brand of residential rinse aid:

https://www.rbnainfo.com/product.php?productLineId=654

It sure looks like the same stuff.

If you have low enough water hardness and TDS, then rinse aid serves no purpose and you can just not use it. Even with higher hardness, the main benefit is just aesthetic.

[nanidin]

Alcohol ethoxylates that were identified to cause epithelial inflammation and barrier damage[0] are listed as ingredients in consumer dish detergents[1] and rinse aids[2].

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36464527/#:~:text=The%20alco....

[1] https://smartlabel.pg.com/en-us/00037000982067.html

[2] https://giantfoodstores.com/product/finish-jet-dry-3-in-1-ri...

[selimthegrim]

Your search and that of the other reply missed the previous sentence “The expression of genes involved in cell survival, epithelial barrier, cytokine signaling, and metabolism was altered by rinse aid in concentrations used in professional (emphasis mine) dishwashers.”