Cleaning Plastic Containers

Cleaning Plastic Containers: For those of you who brown-bag it every day you probably recognize one of these it’s a plastic container and for those of you who have ever microwave safe curry or spaghetti sauce in one of those you will also know what a pain they are to keep clean now the challenge is you actually need to do two things when keeping plastic containers clean you have to get the stains off and you have to get that nasty stink out and I’ve been asked a bunch of times how to do both, the prim and proper way to clean these containers is to hand wash them with dish soap and water however the way most of us deal with cleaning our plastic containers is by simply popping them into the dishwasher guilty as charged now in doing that I’ve noticed that the dishwasher doesn’t get all of those stains out so the question remains how do we remedy these stains and smells that the dishwasher missed you can usually get them out with a good scrubbing using very warm water and simple dish liquid you can also use a cleaning toothbrush to scrub and a little bit of elbow grease which is free and readily available now for tougher stains like tomato sauce or curry you want to make a paste using baking soda with some water and scrub the containers a little bit more you can also deal with the container odors by simply applying baking soda into an empty container let it sit there overnight and then empty the baking soda out rinse the container and your container will be nice and clean and odor-free.

Another natural method is to use the almighty power of the Sun to not only clean your container but to deodorize it as well now I tried this and to my surprise it actually did work so if you don’t have baking soda handy I’m willing to bet that you have sunshine available to you at least for part of the year the Sun also works well to remove odors from wood cutting boards and wood utensils so there’s an interesting tip I’ve also read that vinegar works as do lemons and even oxygen bleach just don’t mix them all together in after containers blessing little life there does come a time when all the cleaning in the world can’t save it and that’s the problem with using plastic containers to store your food they have a very short life cycle that’s why these containers only cost us a few bucks and they end up looking and smelling terrible after only a short period of time your best bet is to invest in some glass containers instead they are much easier to clean they don’t transfer any odors or flavors into your food they don’t absorb stains or smells and they can be reused again and again they can be very easily clean in the dishwasher and the lids to avoid that dishwasher smell you can just hand wash them and that works very well now if you want you can even reuse things like tomato sauce jars or you can pick up the ever-popular an almighty mason jar the food storage and for transporting your lunch to and from work I put salads in here all the time and I love using them we have so many containers in my house that we are kind of cycling out of our kitchen and we’re moving toward the glass idea so instead of throwing these containers out we actually like to use them for storing things like screws buttons and batteries or any other little things around the house.

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