Comment by kbolino

And so we see the real outcome, on this axis, of these kinds of regulations, is to increase the quality gradient. A crappy old barebones water-hungry dishwasher with a phosphate-containing detergent worked just fine for me in an old apartment. Its comparably priced brand-new lower-water equivalent in a new house with phosphate-free detergent works awfully. Now you need a Bosch washer and premium detergent and so on. These exist and by all accounts are great. So we can say that the regulations didn't cause the quality problem, they just shifted the market.

Compliance with the regulations can be done both by the capable and the incapable, but caveat emptor rears its ugly head, and that assumes the end user is the buyer (right now, I'm renting). There's often quite a price gap between good enough and terrible too. A lot of people end up stuck with the crap and little recourse.

The government cares that your dishwasher uses less water and the detergent doesn't put phosphate into the water. It doesn't care that your dishwasher actually works well. We can layer more regulations to fix that problem too, but they will make things cost more, and they will require more expensive and competent civil servants to enforce, and so on. And I don't see any offer in that arrangement to replace my existing dishwasher, which is now just a sunk cost piece of future e-waste that neither the government nor the manufacturer have been made responsible for.