When my boyfriend brought home a fancy reusable spray bottle for our plants, I never knew how much it would come in handy for other things — like disinfecting. Now, we have a spray bottle dedicated solely to spraying isopropyl alcohol on door handles, grocery bags, and even packages. A reusable spray bottle is the perfect thing to have on hand for any cleaning need. Creating a rubbing alcohol mixture or bleach solution on your own is so much more cost-effective and sustainable than buying plastic bottles full of the stuff.
Daily Beast National Reporter Olivia Messer spoke with two experts to give more details on how to disinfect properly. Dr. Adrian Hyzler, the chief medical officer for Healix International, explains that as long as a cleaner “is a 60-70 percent alcohol solution”—or sodium hypochlorite at 0.5 percent or even a crude 0.5 percent chlorine solution, after soap and water—it will kill the virus on surfaces. Professor Eyal Leshem, a global expert on infectious diseases and the director of the Institute for Travel and Tropical Medicine at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center, Tel HaShomer, explained that “disinfectants destroy viruses by breaking the viral envelope or damaging the genetic material contained inside the viral particle.” He stressed that it’s “important that a surface is completely clean without visible staining prior to disinfection and that surfaces are smooth without holes or pores where dirt and viruses can stay viable.”
We have this option that offers a continuous, fine mist. It’s incredibly satisfying to hold down the trigger and watch a soft fog of spray trickling down to give life to our plants or kill viruses (when it’s full of disinfectant). It holds up to 24oz of liquid so we rarely have to refill it and the continuous spray lasts for 1.2 seconds. It also has a 360-degree spray, so you can reach into small crevices or spray underneath things without worrying about having nothing come out. The amount of liquid that comes out of this thing is impressive — I can vouch for this based on how often my loving boyfriend sprays me with it.
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Another option is this two-pack of pretty great looking amber glass bottles. Unlike traditional cleaner spray bottles, these are ones that could leave out on the counter on purpose. It has UV protection, so even if you leave it out in the sun, nothing will degrade because of ultraviolet light. If you’re gonna be spraying things around your home to keep your cool about germs, these are the bottles to have on hand.
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