Replace your kitchen sponge weekly
Don’t try cleaning your sponge, just replace it weekly.
ETA
A couple of related tidbits:
Washing your hands with cold water (and soap) is as effective as warm water.
news.rutgers.edu – Handwashing: Cool Water as Effective as Hot for Removing Germs | Media Relations
Also, the FDA recommends using “plain” soap rather than antibacterial soap. Soap made with Triclosan is no longer approved.
https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm378393.htm
August 7, 2017
I have this argument with my wife repeatedly – anything saturated with food and water, left for hours in a room-temperature or warmer environment is a really obvious health hazard. The scrubbing pads we use go through the dishwasher, so I’m okay with them. But dish cloths and sponges are plainly horrors.
August 7, 2017
I’m disgusted. Basically the study is saying that by sanitizing our sponges we are creating colonies of bacteria that are resistant to the sterilization methods we are using? I have a bucket with bleach water, about a TBS of bleach to a half gallon of water that I throw all the dish rags and sponges into then I wash them weekly and run through a long cycle in the dryer.
August 7, 2017
Nuke them. msue.anr.msu.edu – Sanitizing kitchen sponges
When I was getting my microbiology degree, this was one of the things we researched in our “design a research project” class, and it worked well enough to roughly duplicate the article’s 99.99999% kill rate. (Which, I will point out, still leaves a LOT of bacteria, but that’s because there are a LOT of bacteria everywhere.)
August 7, 2017
I use bleach
August 7, 2017
Just remember that if you bleach-soak the sponges, be really sure to rinse the bleach out, or the next time you use the sponge with some other variety of cleaner, you may get a clorine-based surprise….
August 7, 2017
The interesting part that was news to me is that the parts vacated by dead bacteria are replenished by stronger surviving bacteria.
August 7, 2017
I use cloths, changed daily and never left without being wrung out. So basically super bacteria are being bred…… Ewwwwwww!
August 7, 2017
Chad Haney: that’s one of the issues with using antibiotics. You have a delicate balance of bacteria in you, and when you take broad spectrum antibiotics it wipes out most everything, and what’s left, that then fills in the space, might not be what you want. There are some indications that this process is responsible for a lot of modern health issues, because the bacteria that survive longest and hence recolonize best affect things like our sense of hunger and satiety and cause us to eat more, and other such issues.
August 7, 2017
Personally Household 10% Vinegar > Bleach
August 7, 2017
I run my steel will pads through the dish washer.
The microwave is a good tip, but I’d suggest sitting it in a bowl or in a plate rather than leaving it in there to cool off.
August 7, 2017
I actually clean my dishes with massive colonies of bacteria. It turns out that if you use the same colony of bacteria for a couple of weeks, they create super-sponges. So that’s handy.
(None of this is true.)
Actually, many of my dishes are cleaned by a cat, get washed in a 140° dishwasher with heated drying, and I store my steel wool pads in a Ziploc bag in the freezer – seriously, it keeps them from rusting away, and I’ll wager it inhibits bacterial growth at least a little.
And now I’m thinking that weekly sponge replacement isn’t often enough, and maybe we should have something in more of a use-once-and-dispose mode, like those toilet cleaner pads but less toilet-y.
August 7, 2017
I just grab a paper towel or 2 , fold them up, scrub, dispose.
August 7, 2017
Lol… I’m sure I’ll be ok.
August 7, 2017
Means, till now they were befooling people on the name of cleaning. Now they will say change your tooth brush daily. Weren’t we good during no tooth brush days.
August 7, 2017
A couple of related tidbits:
Washing your hands with cold water (and soap) is as effective as warm water.
news.rutgers.edu – Handwashing: Cool Water as Effective as Hot for Removing Germs | Media Relations
Also, the FDA recommends using “plain” soap rather than antibacterial soap. Soap made with Triclosan is no longer approved.
https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm378393.htm
August 7, 2017
Terry McNeil Oh Terry 🤣. I’ve been washing my sponges for decades!!!! I’m so glad I saw this post!! I use Vinegar & Tea Tree Oil mixture.
I can’t breathe bleach 🙊
August 7, 2017
Michael Verona I’ve heard the tip about freezing steel wool pads, I did that with the SOS variety when I used them, but they now have steel scrubbers that do not rust. I did a *snoopy dance in aisle 11 when I first found them!
April 18, 2018
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