Clean With Water Alone Type Household Melamine Foam

Magic erasers are made from melamine, an organic compound with a wide variety of uses; in practice you’ll find melamine used in everything from sound-dampening materials to dinnerware sets. 

When the rigid crystal structure of melamine is processed, it turns into melamine foam, which is the generic name for magic foam sponge. The melamine foam has a superfine, high-strength structure that behaves a lot like sandpaper with a nearly microscopic level of grit. 

Melamine Foam Sponge are formed differently from other cleaning products and only need water to effectively clean up most stains -- no chemical cleaners or soaps are required. The only deficiency is that melamine foam erasers wear out quickly -- just like pencil erasers do. To all outward appearances, however, melamine foam erasers look and feel just like an ordinary sponge. To view the crucial properties of melamine foam, you need to go down to the microscopic level. This is because when melamine resin cures into foam, its microstructure becomes very hard -- almost as hard as glass -- causing it to perform on stains a lot like super-fine sandpaper. You may be asking yourself, if this foam is almost as hard as glass, then how can it be like a sponge? Because it's a special type of microfiber foam.

Closed-cell foam is easier to visualize, so let's start there. Types of closed-cell foam are usually more rigid because they retain most of their air pockets intact, like a bunch of balls all crammed together. For open-cell foam (typically the more flexible) imagine that those balls have burst, but that some parts of their casings remain. You can picture a squishy sea sponge as an example. In airy melamine foam, only a very limited amount of casing stays in place, and the strands that do are located where the edges of several air pockets overlapped. The foam is flexible because each tiny strand is so slender and small that bending the entire eraser is easy.

The cavity-ridden open microstructure of melamine foam is where the second major boost to its stain-removing capabilities comes in. Besides being able to scrape at stains with extremely hard microscopic filaments, with a few quick runs of the eraser, the stain has already started to split. That's aided by the fact that the dirt is pulled into the open spaces between the spindly skeletal strands and bound there. These two factors combined make this next-generation eraser seem almost magical.

Once you dampen this foam with a little bit of water, tiny filaments open up, helping the sponge’s gritty surface to dig into grime, soap scum, stains, crayon and marker marks, and other boring household confusion.

Compared to conventional sponges, Topeco Clean magic sponges have some strengths. These sponges only require water to clean messes — meaning you won’t need to burn through chemical cleaning products (and plastic packaging). 

Melamine Foam Sponge Erasers can also typically be used multiple times, making them preferable to paper towels and other single-use products. In the end, Melamine Sponges are also non-toxic, and worth using.