How to Wash Juice Pouches

After you have finished drinking your juice pouches and before you start making fabulous things out of them you need to make sure that they are completely clean and dry. I collect about 30 to 50 juice pouches every day and they have to be cleaned right away. Juice pouches that sit with juice still in them begin to ferment and smell really bad. Over the years I have worked out an efficient system to clean a large number of juice pouches at once. If you are not collecting as many juice pouches as I am or if your kids are the only ones drinking them then there is a shortcut you can take.
Here are the basic steps to clean a juice pouch.
Step1-
The bottom of the juice pouch has a flap of plastic that lets the juice pouch expand at the bottom when it is filled with juice and folds and lies flat when the juice pouch is empty.
Remove the straw from the pouch and pull open the bottom of the pouch so that it is no longer flat.


Carefully use a craft knife to cut an opening in the middle of the bottom plastic.
Empty any juice that is left in the pouch and rinse out any left over residue. Shake off the excess water and you are ready for step number two.
Step 2- Remove adhesive.
The second step in cleaning is to remove the adhesive that is left by the straw when it was attached to the outside of the juice pouch. If there is still some plastic left from the straw packaging, carefully remove as much of the plastic as you can.Once the straw plastic is off you can remove the adhesive from the pouch.
Lay the pouch flat on a protected work surface and spray some adhesive remover into the spot that is sticky. I like to use an adhesive remover called Goo Gone because it is environmentally friendly and works really well.

Use a plastic scraper to loosen the adhesive and rinse the pouch off with clean water.

Fill a sink or dish washing pan with a little bit of dish liquid and water and swish the open juice pouch in the soapy water to clean off the adhesive residue and disinfect the juice pouches.

Rub the spot where the adhesive was to make sure that the surface is clean then rinse the pouches under warm clean water.
Shake of the excess water.
Shortcut tip:
If you are cleaning a small number of pouches and/or not digging them out of the trash you can skip step 1 and go right to removing the adhesive. This will save on water usage. I have to rinse the juice pouches that I collect first because trash sometimes ends up in my bin and it is hard to handle them when the kids leave juice in them.