Googling repeatedly tells you to just buy a new kitchen sponge, never boil them because it doesn’t work. But why wouldn’t it clean them?
In: Biology
[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.
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