The dirty truth: They’re smuggling soap in Spokane
By day, Patti Marcotte is a working mom — dealing with the balancing act created by a 5-year-old daughter, a demanding job, a split-level house and a willful boxer puppy.
Come the post-dinner hour, however, Marcotte begins operating in the shadowy world of smuggled soap.
Spokane County in July adopted a near total ban on sales of water-softening phosphates in dishwasher detergent — the first in the nation — in an attempt to slow the flood of pollutants that is sucking oxygen out of the endangered Spokane River, smothering its fish.
The problem, Marcotte and many of her neighbors say, is that most low-phosphate detergents are wimps when it comes to fighting greasy pots and spaghetti-crusted plates. So she has become a detergent outlaw, driving 45 minutes across the Idaho state line to pick up secret stashes of the old, bad dish cleansers: the brutish Cascades, the muscular Electrasols.