Helpful Hint: The Kitchen Sink Scrub Brush

 

Flickr Photo Credit: Eggybird

A friend showed me this, and I’m following her lead. Curious if this approach is for you?

While she occasionally uses the scouring pads for particularly tough scrubbing jobs, there is routinely a small, stiff bristled scrub brush  next to her faucet that she will use along with powdered dish washer detergent as a scouring powder. After all the loose material has been wiped out and thrown away, and the universal solvent (water) has been left to loosen up what it can, she uses the scrub brush set aside for her dishes and a bit of the powdered detergent to get the rest scoured off.

There are a few things I like about this approach. First, it saves on disposable scouring products being dumped in landfills. Second, if you have a dishwasher, you can toss the brush right in with your regular dishes and it gets cleaned and sanitized every time you use it. The reusable scrubbers are often difficult to get completely clean, even with a long soak in the dish water. Even if you don’t have a dish washer (which we don’t at the lake house right now), these brushes are still much easier to clean with a reasonable soak and a little help from my old standby, the old toothbrush.

One more great thing about this idea? It uses another product (dish washer powder) you already have on hand, saving on additional unnecessary cleaning products. If you don’t use the dish washing powder (and if you don’t have a dish washer, why would you), salt, baking soda, or washing soda would probably work, as would powdered laundry detergent. If you still want to wash the pots and casserole dishes with your regular dish soap afterwards, you can. This just gets off the worst of the goop in a hurry.