We’ve had lots of suggestions over the years on how to reuse spray bottles from commercial cleaning products and the like but Nancy has just emailed a related question:

First I want to comment that this is a fantastic website! Everyone in the world should be accessing it.
My question is this:

I’m recycling plastic spray bottles to put pure, herbal cleaning products in. Is there a way to make sure these bottles are clean and free of chemical residue before I reuse them? A way to sanitize them first?

If I was going to use it for another cleaning product, I probably wouldn’t go overboard with cleaning it, just a washout with water or something, (unless the original product was very bleachy or something that would react with my new product) — I personally wouldn’t mind the chemical residue dregs for that first refill. If I was reusing the spray bottle for something else (eg, as a water spray for plants) though, then I’d probably wash it out more thoroughly (a few rinses of hot water) – but still probably not to a level that I’d class as “sanitizing” it so I don’t know what is needed to do that.

(My boyfriend) John uses baby bottle sterilising tablets when he’s cleaning plastic bottles for homebrew – and often has sterilising fluid leftover once his bottles are clean — it is, admittedly, a very weak bleach solution but is apparently stabilised so safer than normal bleach and doesn’t need rinsing off feeding utensils/bottles before they’re used. It seems like overkill to whip up a new batch of the fluid to clean out a cleaning products bottle but if you have it leftover from another use anyway…

Any other suggestions? How much effort do you make to clean out cleaning product bottles before reusing them?

We’ve had an email from Jan C:

Is there anything I can do with carpet freshener bottles? The ones with the holes in the top for shaking. It’s too chemical perfumed for anything I want to shake out (like flour.)

There is a strong Reduce angle here – like many strongly perfumed items, you’re just introducing chemicals to mask the scent and it’s not only not cleaner, you’ve just introduced a whole new bunch of chemicals into your environment/lungs. (If you really want to use it, why not make your own from bicarb of soda? Add a few drops of a pleasant smelling essential oil if you want a scent – although you have to leave it to dry if you do that.)

There are other cleaning products with shakers too – bleach powder is one that immediately springs to mind and while it’s still really-bad-for-the-environment bleach, it’s arguably slightly greener to use powder than liquid bleach as the water has been shipped around considerably more efficiently (in pipes to the point of use rather than on a lorry).

As Jan says, you probably wouldn’t want to use such chemically-saturated/perfumed shakers for, say, dusting your cakes with icing sugar – but are there other reuses for them? If the holes are quite big, you could use it for lightly distributing rock salt/grit in the winter (rather than dumping it in large splats as is common when pouring from a bag). You could also use them for distributing grass seed.

Any other suggestions?