There is some chatter on the intertubes to the effect that the micro-sanding action of the melamine foam isā¦a poor choiceā¦for cleaning heavily soiled children. Thankfully, I cannot comment from personal experience.
Good for cleaning the needle on record players too!
Or you can just buy the generic version at the Dollar store. About the same price as the bulk buy, and you donāt have to worry about storing a big bag of foam blocks.
Roger that! I got 5 pack for 99 cents.
I love these things and will usually pick up the Safeway brand instead which so far have worked just as well for me and way cheaper too.
I used to work with P&G on the Mr Clean brand, and remember when the brand manager excitedly brought in some Magic Erasers to show us for the first time. He said that heād been touring a production facility in Japan when he saw some workers cleaning equipment with chunks of the stuff. They said they had melamine foam sitting around as packing material and discovered it was good for cleaning with. He was especially excited that they were buying it for āpennies on the tonā, and I donāt blame him. We all fell in love with the stuff as soon as we used it.
You can also get giant packs of these over at Aliexpress for even cheaper. One thing Iāve found, though (even with the Mr Clean branded ones) is that you can see where they were used on certain painted surfaces. We had some wall stains that I cleaned off with magic erasers, and while they got rid of the stain, you could definitely see where they had been used from certain angles.
At the very least, rinse them off before eating them. If youāll recall, melamine bits caused a number of poisonings in China a few years ago.
The generics do fall apart faster. They also compress and stay compressed. Otherwise they work just fine. But my husband doesnāt want me to use them on surfaces that will scratch like the stove or refrigeratorā¦which is where they are most needed.
I was going to say, in addition to their cleaning properties they can be used to boost the apparent protein content of food - yay science! Errā¦
You canāt fool me, thereās no such thing as magic.
That might just be perception. Iāve never had any issue with any of the generic brands iāve tried, after all there is no magic secret ingredient, they are all just melamine foam of near identical densities. The generic are identical products.
@nungesser - cool story, i love the personal stories that happy mutants share on the forums.
Great for exfoliating, though!
These things work better for cleaning the soap scum out of a shower than anything else Iāve tried, with or without added cleansers or scouring agents. Donāt seem to do any damage to tile or plastic structures.
Yes, the reason is as has been mentioned, itās essentially sandpaper. You can see where it was used because it has altered the surface texture.
If you go too far, you can even go completely through the paint and expose the paper of the drywall.
Meh, Iām OK with that. Weāre planning on painting pretty soon anyway, and the stupid scuff marks from shoes and sports equipment Iām done looking at. Also, got the damned Sharpie off a closet door that my kid put there while under the sharp supervision of his grandmother (not sharp at all, tāwas a jest).
Melamine resin is bound up and doesnāt leech into food very easily, itās a safe plastic. Formica is actually melamine-resin impregnated in kraft paper or fabric,.
Melamine resin dinnerware actually became quite fashionable and popular in the 60s and 50s as some of the first plastic dinnerware, until it started building up a reputation for scratching and staining easily, and eventually people mostly switched to other materials when the consumer-grade microwave (which melamine wasnāt safe in) became a regular household appliance.
Other than not being microwave (or dishwasher) safe melamine plates are actually pretty decent. Theyāll scratch, but not shatter easily, and theyāre quite lightweight, so backpackers (or other people who have need of lightweight reusable plates they wonāt be using a microwave oven with) still use them sometimes.
The media reports didnāt go into enough detail for me to say for sure(surprise, surpriseā¦); but my impression was that unpolymerized melamine monomers were what was being added to fool basic protein content assays; while polymerized melamine is a plastic with a long and fairly innocuous history. I certainly wouldnāt seek exposure(if nothing else, ānuisance dustā is never good, even if itās just momās apple pie ground into a fine powder); but Iād be inclined to me less worried about the polymer version.
