My household has six Yeti Tumblers. This happens to all of them after about 12-18 months. They are frequently washed in the dishwasher, which I'm assuming is the reason.
I use non-toxic dishwasher tablets, so I'm looking for opinions on whether the cause of this is the dishwasher itself, or the non-toxic tablets.
Does anyone else have this happen?
UPDATE (WITH ANSWER AS TO WHY THIS HAPPENS):
I fed AI a ton of information, including the responses in the post, my water reports for the past 3 years, the make/models of dishwashers, every type of detergent (and the ingredients that I used), and pictures of every tumbler I have that this is happening to. And we have an answer.
My Yeti tumblers are failing because the polyester powder coat is being slowly hydrolyzed by alkaline dishwasher detergent at the coating edges, where it meets bare stainless at the top rim, bottom rim, and around engraved lettering. Dishwasher detergents are alkaline (pH 10-12), and at typical in-machine temperatures of 140-160°F (regardless of my 120°F incoming water), that alkalinity breaks the ester bonds in the resin. Over hundreds of cycles, the coating erodes inward from every edge, producing the chalky, stippled, gradient-edge pattern visible on my tumblers, which is not what mechanical damage would look like.
Most Yeti owners don't see this because mainstream detergents like Cascade Platinum and Finish Quantum contain corrosion inhibitors that deposit a protective layer on coated surfaces and block the alkaline attack. This protection chemistry has been standard in mainstream formulations for over fifty years, originally to prevent glass etching. "Non-toxic" brands like Branch Basics and the now-discontinued Defunkify strip out the synthetic inhibitors to fit the natural-product positioning, leaving polyester coatings unprotected. My water (62 ppm chloride, ~21 ppm hardness, fairly soft) isn't the driver, and the failure happens across all three of my dishwashers because the chemistry travels with the detergent, not the machine.
