Plastic is oil-based. It repels water and bonds with oil. Soap does also bond with oil but you’re fighting a much more uphill battle with plastic than with, say, glass or metal. Even with other concerns about plastic aside, if this bothers you, start looking for glass.
Saw a cool trick on IG, bit wasteful but works if you really want to save the container (I agree we should switch away from plastics - someday…). Piece of paper towel or napkin, drop of dish soap, a splash of hot water, close tight and shake thoroughly so the paper goes all around the inside, remove paper, rinse, wash normally.
Buying glass containers was a gamechanger for me.
One swoop - and it’s clean. No grease sticks, it washes even easier than ceramic plates.
Plastic is a terrible container material for greasy foods.
It’s terrible period
Nah, things like PLA are generally fine
its the same taking a bath. after the first swipe, youre wiping with that filth in a steadily increasing amount. the dirt never goes completely away in a tub
Bath is for soaking, shower first. And add some bath salts.
i thought bath salts were for smoking
Did you use hot burning water?
Water doesn’t get hot enough, that’s why i usually wash plastic containers in hot frying oil
I would suggest lava then.
I would, but there aren’t any stores nearby that sells it
You just gotta cook it up yourself! The store-bought stuff is never fresh anyway
my water is on fire what next
Use lava then, come on, use your mind!
Dawn directly on sponge, I never have this problem.
You mean leave it out where the Sun’s first light will catch it?
Everytime i still feel the oil on the container, i’ll just wash my sponge and squeeze some a fresh new dish soap and wash with it. Usually clean afterward, it’s almost always the grease-soaked sponge.
I find that it’s more effective to put detergent on the dish, scrub with wet sponge, rinse. That keeps the detergent at high concentration at the surface, where the action happens. Detergent on the sponge, on the other hand, tends to migrate away towards the center of the sponge.
I switched from soaping the sponge to soaping the dish like 10 years ago and never looked back.
It’s either that, or not rinsing the dirty dishes with tap water before starting the soap-cleaning procedure. Salt, in particular, totally wrecks the cleaning power of the soap. There’s an entire science around this, actually.
Either your dish soap sucks ass, or your technique does if washing doesn’t get rid of grease and oil the first time.
Pro tip: use an actual soap bar, the one you wash your hands with. Works way better for oils, and particularly specifically on plastic.
Where I am, there are also soap bars for household tasks, with a shitload of acid in them. Would probably clean oil even better
I would expect them to have a shitload of alkalines in them, not acid… Acids dont do much to fat, and bar soap is alkaline…
I started thinking that surely you’re right, remembering that alkaline bile helps digest lipids. But, hard soap does in fact contain over 70% fatty acids while ultimately somehow being alkaline.
And regular soap is also a salt of a fatty acid, just with more additives. Perhaps the ‘salt’ part is where the alkalinity comes in, but I’m not good at chemistry.
Oil plus alkali = soap.
The oil/lipid that is included in the soap itself is a fatty acid. But the actual cleaning action comes from the alkaline reaction with oils (including the oils you’re trying to clean off).
All of this is also separate from the general point that dishwashing detergents tend not to be soaps at all.
In this scenario I would add some dishwasher powder to some hot water and leave it for a while, the enzymes digest the fats and can be much more effective in some circumstances
End the microplastic pollution, use glass or metal
From where I’m from plastic was kind of luxury until 90’s and that’s one of very few things from that country that would be great to bring back.
Inatead of cellophane bags there were netting bags or paper ones, bottles were all glass that got collected, sent back to factories to be washed and refillled. If one got their hands on plastic bag or bottle, probably somehow smuggled from the West - it was a goddamn status symbol from then on, and you don’t throw your status symbol away. 🌝
That’s a very different perspective! Eastern Europe?
Yup. And yeah - it’s not like USSR didn’t have plastic - it simply wasn’t used for bags and bottles.
My wife is starting to get really irritated with me as I begin my recycled jar collection.
The problem I foresee is that most of my old salsa jar lids will eventually rust and I’m not sure what to replace them with.
You replace them new lids. Where I live loose jar lids are sold in packs in practically every supermarket. Really not difficult to find at all.
For Mason jars that is fine. My issue is with my Mrs Renfro salsa jars I’ve collected, they are not a standard Mason jar size lid
Where I live, you can just go into a market and find jar lids of any diameter. It’s really useful
Really? Find out why.
Glass recycles, so you could recycle the jar and replace it
You could also use beeswax wraps, or a silicone sheet and a tie
If you need the sterility of a sealed jar, I imagine you’ll just need to replace them over time
Glass recycles
Not as much as you might think. A lot of places have stopped recycling glass because it’s hazardous and there are huge backlogs of recycled glass. Yes it recycles from a material science perspective, but from a logistics perspective there are issues.
Over here over 90% of glass put in the recycling is recycled into new glass bottles/jars. The rest of the glass goes into making roads
You guys having problems recycling glass?
I struggle to comprehend that the dangers of broken glass haven’t been overcome everywhere
You’re lucky, my area stopped recycling glass years ago. Like I said, there’s a huge backlog which makes processing less attractive. Also most recycling seems to be single stream (all recyclables go in one bin and get sorted at the facility), and broken glass contaminates the other recyclables which is dangerous to human sorters and is abrasive to machines.
I’ve seen a couple pilot programs pulverizing glass for concrete, but as with lots of recycling (looking at you plastic) in most places it’s not as simple as “Just recycle it”. Again, more a logistics issue than a material one.
I think it may be an issue in your area, also, where do you live? That’s such a bad way of recycling…
I always thought it was extremely silly where I live there is just a “recycling bin”. The lack of specificity makes the problem worse because people get confused what is recyclable. The infamous example is disgusting dirty nappies going in recycle bin because they have plastic in them…
I’ve also seen family members put dirty plastic wrap / film in recycling, and composite materials like Doritos packets. I’ve tried to explain it but they just don’t get it, it’s too complicated for most people. That’s not saying they’re dumb or anything; it is complicated. That just means we should maybe consider simplifying it.
I feel like if there was a “glass” bin, most people would only put glass in it. Same with metal (not sure most people could separate aluminium with steel or anything like that).
I try to avoid looking in the bins here because I don’t think anyone else pays attention to what goes where and there’s always plastic in the glass bin and cardboard in the general waste
I’m always jealous when I visit a place which has separate bins for plastic, glass, metal, paper, and compost. I’m seriously considering trying to get on my city’s waste management board to improve our recycling. But we have to live in the environment we have until we can make it into the one we want.
The return and earn program does dedicated glass, plastic and aluminium sorting and recycling fwiw
Should get glass or metal containers (ore sometimes even ceramic) if you can afford it or if you can sneak them into your bag/inner coat pocket.
I bought some when I could afford it ~five years ago and they’re still like new.
…You have to take out the sealing band and wash it separately from the lid. So many containers are ruined because people don’t take out the seals and the grow mouldy. ;-;
That’s when it becomes a problem for the dishwasher.
Have you considered it is not the dish but perhaps your greasy sausage fingers?
Food for thought.
Mmm greasy sausage finger
I like my fingers deep-fried. Slides right of the bone.
I’ve dunked half my hand in an active deep fryer before. I was 19.
I knew what I was doing so it was all coordinated, into the oil, grab the item, pivot 180 directly to the sink and cold water for a couple minutes.
Lightening fast. Barely had first degree burns. Was perfectly functional the next day.
It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, I doubt I could ever pull it off again. NEVER TRY THIS.
Almost 20 years later I have no idea how I walked away from that intact.
