The Countertop Ingredient That Makes Cleaning Plastic Cutting Boards Low-Effort

You already know that chemicals are far from the end-all-be-all when it comes to cleaning your kitchen. Your plastic cutting boards are no exception. Your plastic cutting boards, of course, can go in the dishwasher — unlike your wooden boards, which should never be cleaned that way — and that will get them sanitized. However, dishwashers have an all-too-frequent habit of leaving stains behind. Scrubbing the stains furiously with peroxide and baking soda will eventually get these stains out, but not before you exhaust yourself and make your shoulder sore. There's a super-sneaky hack to effortlessly lifting pesky discoloration from plastic cutting boards, and it's already in your kitchen: lemons.

Just like lemons are one of the many kitchen ingredients you can use to clean burnt pans, so can you use this sour citrus for bleaching stains out of plastic. The secret is to combine lemon juice with a healthy dose of sunshine (another plentiful ingredient). Rubbing a cut lemon over your stained plastic cutting boards and letting the juice soak in the sun for a few days is certainly not the fastest way to take out stains, but it definitely involves the least work.

Lemon is a champion cleaning product, thanks to its high concentration of citric acid. Just like putting a lemon through a wash cycle is the key to cleaning your dishwasher, the magical antimicrobial properties of lemon juice work elsewhere in the kitchen as well. Citric acid is also a natural bleaching agent, but sunlight boosts lemon's stain-fighting properties to a 10. That's because the UV rays in sunlight break down the chemical bonds that cause stains to "stick" to materials like fabric or plastic, making colors fade.

The key factor here is time. Sunlight and lemon juice will lighten your hair, take stains out of laundry, and revitalize your discolored cutting boards. But they won't do it in one afternoon. Plan on at least several days in the sun for this method to work its magic. Check the weather forecast for a pleasant week, and do all your cutting boards at once. Within a few days, these surfaces will look good as new, for next to no cost ... and no aching arms, either.