This might change someone’s life: Instead of washing your spaghetti stained plastic container with a sponge or throwing it in the dishwasher, fill the container to maybe 30% full with hot tap water, add a couple pumps of dish soap, chuck in a paper towel, close the top, and shake. It’s honestly astonishing how effective that is.
Basically what’s been said. Lycopene is the pigment that is staining. It’s hydrophobic and is really good at bonding to plastics for reasons outside my understanding. Soap and abrasion will loosen it, but because it’s hydrophobic it has nowhere to go. The absorbent paper towel gives it something else to bond to.
My thoughts, too. That, and maybe some slight abrasion?
Watch it be something ridiculous like “the slight fibers are exfoliated from the paper by the soap, and those exponentially increase surface area of the degreaser in the soap and combine with the minute amount of bleach in the white paper towel to form a new chemical agent that’s highly effective in bleaching and degreasing that specific type of plastic and polarized fat, separating the two in a volumetric capillary action that essentially transfers the stain onto the fibers of the paper.”
This might change someone’s life: Instead of washing your spaghetti stained plastic container with a sponge or throwing it in the dishwasher, fill the container to maybe 30% full with hot tap water, add a couple pumps of dish soap, chuck in a paper towel, close the top, and shake. It’s honestly astonishing how effective that is.
What role does the paper towel perform?
Basically what’s been said. Lycopene is the pigment that is staining. It’s hydrophobic and is really good at bonding to plastics for reasons outside my understanding. Soap and abrasion will loosen it, but because it’s hydrophobic it has nowhere to go. The absorbent paper towel gives it something else to bond to.
@remindme@mstdn.social 1 day
@jaybone Here is your reminder!
My entirely unqualified thought is that it gives the food stain particles something to bind to that isn’t the plastic of the container
My thoughts, too. That, and maybe some slight abrasion?
Watch it be something ridiculous like “the slight fibers are exfoliated from the paper by the soap, and those exponentially increase surface area of the degreaser in the soap and combine with the minute amount of bleach in the white paper towel to form a new chemical agent that’s highly effective in bleaching and degreasing that specific type of plastic and polarized fat, separating the two in a volumetric capillary action that essentially transfers the stain onto the fibers of the paper.”