How To Clean Your Kitchen Sponge – Best Methods to Sanitize a Sponge at Home

Let’s admit it, no one is fond of washing their dishes with a dirty kitchen sponge, but your kitchen sponge will inevitably get dirty after a few days of usage. It’s not even our liking that we want out sponges free of germs but it is a fact that dirty sponge reduces the effectiveness of it and can cause diseases.

For these reasons, cleaning your dirty kitchen sponge is very important and here we have provided you with the best and most effective way of doing so. Looking through the internet we found many ways to do the said task but the said method comes out as the top.

Best Way to Clean a Sponge

You need to mix ¾ cup of bleach with a glass of water weighing a gallon and then let the sponge soak out for at least five minutes. After five minutes, let the sponge rinse and now you have a very clean sponge. Bleach here kills 99.9% of the germs which is also the key benchmark of the EPA.

It must be kept in mind that you use this method over and over again every week as it doesn’t manner how careful you are, the sponge will catch bacteria and germs after continuous cleaning and will need cleaning again.

Some other methods

As mentioned earlier, the above-mentioned method that uses bleach but regardless, here are the three other ways to clean your kitchen sponge and these methods are in the order of best to worst in respect of effectiveness.

1. Microwave

After bleach, we can comfortably say that the microwave method is the best method to clean your kitchen sponge. It is very easy to perform, you just need to put the sponge inside of the microwave, mixing the sponge in water (preferably 1/2 cup of water for cellulose and 1/4 cup for scrub sponges). After saturation, you now go forward and start heating the sponge for one minute or two minutes for scrub and cellulose respectively. Just like bleach, this method will also kill 99.9% of the germs.

2. Dishwasher

As the name suggests, in the second method we will use a regular dishwasher load. It is a very task to use this method as well. You will need to add your kitchen sponge that requires cleaning to the regular dishwasher load and use a “heated dry” setting. Just like the bleach and microwave method, this method will also kill 99.9% of the germs.

3. Vinegar

The effectiveness of using vinegar as a means to clean your kitchen sponge is the least at 99.6% compared to 99.9% of other methods. For using this method, you have to take a bowl of full-strength vinegar and dip the sponge to let it soak for five minutes and that’s it.

These are the best ways to clean kitchen sponge and sanitize a sponge. Kindly replace the sponge with a new one after several cleanups.