Eli5… How does a box of baking soda absorb smells? Does the stuff buried at the bottom absorb smells? Is the box in your pantry for cooking… Absorbing smells?
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The ability of baking soda to absorb smells is overstated.
Smells can be absorbed, though. A smell is a molecule (or particle contains molecules) floating in the air. If the floating molecule hits a surface that it reacts with, then it will no longer be floating in the air and will not reach your nose. There’s products you can buy which do this better than baking soda. You can buy products that remove humidity this way as well.
Baking soda that you cook with should be kept covered so that it stays fresh.
If you do use baking soda to remove odors, the carton should be left wide open to get the smelly air in. Then periodically you should pour off the top layer so that the layer on top is more reactive and less “used up”.
The last time I explained this, I got downvotes and people accused me of being an agent of Big Baking Soda trying to con people into spending an extra buck once or twice a year for this purpose. I don’t think baking soda works very well. There’s not a lot of surface area in the little carton for it to remove a lot of odor. I only use it this way if I feel my cooking baking soda needs to be replaced and I don’t feel like pouring the half-used old one down the toilet.
Baking soda is rather poor at absorbing smells. Activated charcoal is exceptionally good.
Neither works well in a refrigerator simply because there is nothing moving air past the chemical so that it could absorb the smells. It’s a tiny box with an opening of a few square inches, usually against a back wall, that gets almost not air flow.
**tl;dr it doesn’t really work well. Chemically it’s not great, no real surface area, no real air flow past.**
My mother used to bake with refrigerator baking soda and I am so triggered right now. Her chocolate cake always tasted like freezer burn and I never knew why until my sister told me.
I believe it’s from the it’s the idea of it having desiccating properties? I never really understood this one either but definitely perpetuated it.
Coffee grounds are great for getting rid of refrigerator smells – discovered this trick when we rented a cabin and the previous renters forgot the fish they caught (for a few days!) Coffee grounds right out of the can did a great job of absorbing the odor
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