How To Remove Sticky Labels From Jars

August 24, 2018

Are you ready for one of the easiest tutorials of your life? Because I have it for you.

If you haven’t noticed, grocery stores are full of plastic. However, there are fortunately some tricks to avoiding plastic when grocery shopping that are actually quite easy to apply to your life. One of the easiest swaps is seeing if any of your beloved items come in glass.

Now there are quite a few glass items that still have plastic lids, which you can easily recycle by mailing it to the Gimme 5 Program. But other jars, such as those found for pasta sauce or pickles, have typical canning lids. Aka, it’s the kind of jar you are going to want to keep. If only it weren’t so difficult to remove that sticky label…

Friends, it’s super easy to remove one of these. All it takes is a little water, a little baking soda, and a little elbow grease.

First, boil some hot water in your tea kettle. Once boiling, fill up the jar until the water reaches past the label. Close the lid and let it sit for at least five minutes.

Carefully open the lid with gloved hands (that baby is HOT) and pour out the hot water. You may find it easy to just slip off the label at this point—most of the time it just falls off for me.

Next, I would run the jar under cold water. Don’t want to burn your hands while trying to get the gunk off.

Once you’ve done that, put a teaspoon of baking soda into a small bowl. When it’s time to scrub, I recommend using an old toothbrush. I clean all of Oliver’s old ones, since he uses plastic ones still, and use them for cleaning purposes. Dip the damp toothbrush in the baking soda, and scrub away at the sticky stuff on the jar. You’ll start to notice it coming off after a few seconds, but it may take a minute or so of scrubbing. Worth it for a free leftovers container? Absolutely!