My favorite pen, the Pilot G-2, has a rubber grip that I have noticed gets sticky and tacky after a while. I’ve never been sure if it was due to the rubber itself or just my grubby fingers.
I think he was speaking just about the tools in his shop. I’m sure there’s plenty of other ways for it to happen as well. UV exposure, heat, humidity, cleaning products that come in to contact with them etc.
I suspect products like hand lotion and suntan lotion go into solution with some plastics and rubbers and make a mess of them. I’ve heard that Banana Republic suntan lotion permeates the adhesive that holds iPhones together and makes them fall apart, and that this problem costs more to Apple than the suntan lotion makes as profit for its manufacturer. I use 100% DEET insect repellant when hiking and have noticed the finish on my car interior around the center console where my knee tends to rest turned into a sticky mess soon after I started using the DEET.
I had some strobe (flash photography) heads that I got for cheap several years ago that had kind of a rubberized surface. They got that sticky gross feeling to them, and I couldn’t GIVE them away.
Our pooper scooper handles have rubber grips and they became extremely tacky/sticky. I wrapped them with hockey tape a couple of years ago and they’ve been non-sticky every since.
Yeah I understood that DEET does tend to gradually melt rubber. I switched to Picaridin so it would not melt my hiking pole handles and sunglasses.
I know I’m late to the game, but here is my somewhat educated, but not expert opinion. I think the plastics that cause the most problem with me are polyurethanes. I’ve found that a good scrubbing with ample use of citrus based “goo gone” type solvents work for me. I sometimes have to scrape them a bit with an edge but the goo goes away.
I rarely have this problem, and I can usually trace it to aersolized oil. Like, anything plastic in the kitchen if we fry latkes risks being ruined. But I suppose if you use greasy stuff on your hands and then handle plastic that could cause the same problem.
Either way, I think the issue is that the oil dissolves into the surface of the plastic, weakening it and leaving it “tacky”.
Years ago I took a vacation to Costa Rica. DEET is very necessary in the Central American rainforest. Except I found it dissolved the labels on the buttons on the camera I had at the time very quickly. After that trip all the buttons were pretty much unlabeled, and I had to just memorize what they did.
I’ve also had a problem with sunscreen causing wear to my car’s steering wheel, although not nearly as bad as DEET. Since my car is a convertible I often put sunscreen on before driving. I used to use the spray on kind just because it was more convenient, but after just a few months of owning the car I was seeing noticeable wear on the steering wheel where I put my hands. I’m almost certain the sunscreen was dissolving the plastic.
Here’s the item that inspired my OP: a mini external speaker that had been sitting in a closet for a couple of years.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/vWCsZyugmKGPbDWP8
I’m thinking that the coating has deteriorated just from exposure to the air or the oils from my hands over time, since it hasn’t been subjected to heat or any kind of sunscreen, etc. I’m guess that if I scrape off all the top layer it will be okay for awhile, but then that layer will start to degrade as well.
I put a good quality leather steering wheel cover on my steering wheel when it started deteriorating. If you install it correctly it almost looks stock.
Yep.
Tossed it and bought a new razor.
I’m in the process of moving my home office. I have 25 years of accumulated “stuff” that I need to go through and save or toss. I was going through a huge (50+ lbs.) box of mostly power adapters, and found some prototypes of a project I worked on in 1992. All of the plastic bumpers had turned into goo:
A lot of soft plastics are just chemically unstable: they degrade faster if they get are exposed to high temperatures (inside your car or garage), or to water, or to air, or to oil, or (self-catalyzing) are exposed to their own break-down products:
The three bonds most susceptible to hydrolytic degradation are the ester, urea and urethan (figure 2). The ester reverts to the acid and alcohol. This acid further catalyzes ester hydrolysis. This reaction then becomes autocatalytic. Because of the autocatalytic nature of ester hydrolysis it is the most prevalent. The urea bond hydrolyzes to a carbamic acid and an amine. The carbamic acid normally isn’t stable and typically undergoes further reaction. The urethane, although somewhat less susceptible, undergoes hydrolysis to yield a carbamic acid and an alcohol.
Chemical degradation of polyurethane. - Free Online Library (thefreelibrary.com)
Notoriously, the polyurethane soles of runners degrade after a few years, and sometimes they just fall apart.
Just yesterday, I pulled out a curling iron that I hadn’t used in a few years. The handle and the piece that your thumb presses on to open the curling iron are coated in a rubbery plastic. Those surfaces were so sticky that I couldn’t use it. I had to wrap it in some pet bandages (gauze that sticks to itself). The curling iron was stored in an upstairs closet. I’m guessing the hot and humid conditions in the summer helped degrade the rubber. I wonder if I had used it regularly, if the same thing would have happened.
In my kitchen, the rubbery lids to Rubber Maid containers do this. They’ve become “gummy” and unpleasant to touch. Also, the plastic parts of the handles of cooking tongs turn into goo. But just on some cheaper ones; my Oxo ones are still going strong.
Some of my Rubbermaid containers get brittle after a few years, so that if I drop them, they crack or break. (Some of these containers are ten or twenty years old, though, so it’s not an immediate thing.)
I’ve got a few items that had rubberized surfaces that degraded over the years. Most of the time I use rubbing alcohol to get all of the rubberization off, exposing a hard plastic surface beneath. This can diminish the appearance of the item and also the feel when holding it. Either way, it’s preferable to it being sticky and leaving black residue on your hand.
I do have a pair of binoculars that this hasn’t worked on. After several minutes of working on them the rubberized surface is only slightly diminished. Looks like it’d be several hours of work to get it all removed. I’m loath to throw them away though because they were a gift from my late grandpa.
Maybe put them on a shelf where you can look at them but then get a new pair for actual day-to-day use (or not, if you’re not going to use them). That would solve the problem of wanting to keep them for sentimental reasons but not wanting to keep them because you don’t like touching them.