Phosphates
Under these circumstances I guess they are an off-sale of left-over quantities of detergent compounds in the company that pruduces them... That would also explain the low price of them!
Here in Germany phosphates are not forbidden, but the use is restricted to protect the environment. But still most detergents for dishwashers contain more than 30% of it! Phosphates are a very good compound for cleaning and softening water in one go without producing a foaming condition! It would have been better to update the sewage centres all over the countries to take off the phosphates from the waste waters than to take them off the detergents but that would have cost a lot more than the way they handled it finally, namely to ban or restrict the amount of phosphates in them.
Phosphates have three unbeatable features: they work like a tenside, are a good water softener plus the characteristics of alkalines, namely to raise the ph-value which increases the wash-performance over again.
And better than Soda or SASil (sodium-aluminium-silicate) they are non-precipitating softeners, which means, they keep the hardness blocked and diluted in the water and not like the precipitating agents (soda and SASil), which build up small particles that appear in the water as a white residue (like milk or flour in water). To avoid residues on the washing as good as possible, sometimes to be found as white streaks on blacks and dark coloured items although, detergents need to contain much more tensides today as the old phosphate containing ones, to help to keep the particles diluted AND to keep up the wash-performance because phosphates, as just mentioned, also work as a cleaning agent!
Ralf
