Sunday, November 1, 2020

Zorange workshop hand cleaner review

If you look carefully at the ingredients of most heavy duty granulated workshop hand cleaners they use plastic beads as the abrasive medium. That's even some of the ones that market themselves as 'natural'. I used Swarfega for years without fully realising and thinking about what polygrains actually were. Shame on you guys at Swarfega et al for ever thinking that it was a cool thing to be washing tons of tiny plastic grains down the sink.

Of course recently there has been a move away from microbeads, polygrains or whatever the marketing folk care to call the tiny lumps of plastic they sneak in to their products but many still contain them.

Nowadays there are several products on the market that are more friendly to the environment - to the extent that they don't contain actual plastic and really it's a no-brainer to buy these ones and avoid the others like the plague. After searching around I settled on 'Zalpon Zorange' by Rozalex, it is fairly easy to find and the abrasive medium is ground up pumice stone.

The good news is that Zorange is a pretty similar hand washing product to others on the market. It works just as well as Swarfega Tough or any of the others. 

Personally I'd like to find something more enviro-friendly still, in packaging and biodegradable non-toxic nature of the ingredients. Any suggestions welcome. But until then Zorange will suit me fine.


5 comments:

  1. Dont know if it is readily available in the UK, but absolutely nothing beats GOOP hand cleaner. It's lanolin based. Mixes with any grime and grease on your hands and wipes off clean with shop towels. No washing. Leaves your hands nice and supple too. Good for removing grease stains from clothing too. Way better than any hand soap with grit.
    https://goophandcleaner.com/original-goop-multi-purpose-hand-cleaner
    UK distributor listed under Get Goop /Distributor

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    1. Hey Michael. Thanks for the suggestion. Just checked it out and it is easily available in the UK. Seems like they've only just started importing it. Soon as my current cleaner is out I'll order a pot and give it a go.

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  2. I use a teaspoon of coffee grounds with a few drops of kitchen oil and some liquid ecofriendly soap. Almost for free and works perfectly, even better than Swarfega. After a few days coffee grounds become moldy, so it's better to let them dry a bit.

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    1. Thanks for the tip. I'll try it. I wonder if it is possible to make a batch of the mix using another abrasive medium than coffee grounds so that it doesn't go moldy?
      I did some repairs at a workshop in Turkey one time, they had an outdoor sink. You wetted your hands, dipped them in a bucket of sawdust and then used a regular bar of soap with the sawdust. It worked fine. A bit messy for indoor use though!

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  3. Great article! Thanks for sharing I added some thoughts on Hand cleaner sometime ago

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