The fact that trisodium phosphate (TSP) exists and is useful in laundry, but no longer commercially allowed, is interesting. But the political angle of the piece spends a lot of time on rhetoric that seems somewhat irrelevant. The substantive claim of this piece is that TSP is not a danger to the environment and therefore should not be regulated. But strangely, only one short paragraph of this lengthy piece actually makes that argument, and it doesn't include any references or data. In fact it seems to actually admit in passing that TSP might be a danger to the environment, but claims that alternative mitigation measures, like filtering wastewater, would be successful (no evidence is produced for this claim). Yet the entire piece rests on that analysis. If he doesn't establish that TSP is either safe, or possible to make safe through less invasive regulation, then the tedious tale of how he likes the effect of using TSP in his laundry, and how evil government is on a crusade to ruin the joys of modern living for no good reason (just because they hate modern living), falls apart.
This is an interesting article, but the author fails to outline the plausible rationale for regulation here. He argues that markets should make individuals lives better through better performance. The issue here is the negative side-effects (so-called-market-externalities), that mess up the common spaces of society (ie, Environmental damage).
Since these externalities vary with strategies for achieveing performance, its true that not all such performance stands by itself as otherwise equal.
His argument would be much more interesting if the case for externalities was argued head on. For example, it might be the case (we would need to crunch the data) that all of the xtra water/energy from using -less- cleaning power is <worse> for the environment than figuring out a waste-water filtration system for phostphate by-products.
But the article as it stands only raises the possibility of analysis. It does not actually provide it. Either in framework, or in Data. Unfortunately...
