[A study](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06055-9#Sec2) found that it didn’t really help in the long term, even if it did have an immediate impact – and, in fact, it might make it *worse*.
> Sanitation by boiling or microwave treatment has been shown to significantly reduce the bacterial load of kitchen sponges and can therefore be regarded as a reasonable hygiene measure. However, our data showed that regularly sanitized sponges (as indicated by their users) did not contain less bacteria than uncleaned ones. Moreover, “special cleaning” even increased the relative abundance of both the *Moraxella–* and *Chryseobacterium–*affiliated OTUs. Presumably, resistant bacteria survive the sanitation process and rapidly re–colonize the released niches until reaching a similar abundance as before the treatment.
Boiling or microwaving will KILL the bacteria. What it won’t do is REMOVE the dead bacteria. That means there is dead biological material that’s just food for more bacteria. The more you sanitize the sponge, the faster more new bacteria will grow… ELI5-when you kill bacteria it becomes bacteria food.
Edit: Wow. So. Heat, UV, bleach & desiccation(alcohol/sanitizer) can all kill bacteria. But there is no practical way to clean the material out of the deep pores of a sponge without destroying it. Nothing is as good as a clean sponge.
A short video of a single celled organism dying that demonstrates this concept:
DISCLAIMER: I am by no means a subject matter expert nor do I represent big sponge corp.
I guess I take them for granted when I work for the US’s largest dish scrubber company. We hve bags of them that they give you to take home and pass out to family..
When I asked an engineer this they said:
Microwaving and boiling do sanitize better than no measures at all but you don’t kill everything in them and they repopulate quickly. Boiling and microwaving also don’t release the trapped food particles inside that lead to future infestations.
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