Degreasing Aged Plastic!

Just like people, action figures age. Over time, some vinyl plastic figures may become greasy or as I say, they 'sweat.' Here is one solution that I found to solve this annoying dilemma!

1.) What you will need!

1. LA's Totally Awesome All Purpose Cleaner Concentrate
2. A container for soaking (I use a small bucket)
3. Warm Water
4. Paper towels for cleanup/ mess reduction

I bought this bottle for $1 at Dollar Tree. It is also a great cleaner for many other tasks.

2.) Fill the container with about half concentrate and half water.

I fill my bucket about halfway to completely submerge my current batch of greasy pieces. This is an estimate learned better over time.

I then fill my bucket with about the same amount of warm water. Warm water reacts better for cleaning than cold water, but it is not as intense as hot water.

3. Place all of your sticky/greasy parts entirely in the cleaning solution.

Here are some of my sweaty pieces. Flexible plastics are more prone to sweating than harder plastics; I have a great scientific explanation for the sweating at the end of this post.

Try to completely submerge all pieces in the solution. The 1/6 body shown only had greasy shoulders, and that floating head needs to be pushed down.

4. For no more than 5 minutes, swish the pieces around for optimal cleaning.

Constantly jumble and swish the pieces so the solution can better clean each crevice of the sculpts. I would not suggest leaving the pieces stagnate for 5 minutes straight.

To show what the cleaning solution can do if unsupervised, here is a head that was part of an earlier cleaning session when I was less experienced. I let him soak in the solution and forgot about him for an hour. Notice the darker brown circle on his crown. That part of his head floated above the water, so it did not fade from the hour long exposure to the cleaning solution.

5. Take each piece out as quickly as possibly and thoroughly rinse off the solution.

Wash off all pieces to completely remove the solution. Residual cleaning solution on the plastic may lead to discoloration.

To show how dirty and greasy my pieces were, here is the remaining water after the cleanse.

6. Let the pieces dry.

Let your pieces dry. Water left in figures can cause mildew and mold to start growing in your storage areas. If these figures were sweaty, chances are, they need some fresh air anyway to prevent further sweating. Let them sit for a few days.

7. The plastic pieces are now degreased!

To prevent further sweating, store your figures in a manner where their plastics have access to air. Figures essentially need to 'breathe.' Some of the colors may not be as vibrant as they once were after this cleanse, but unfortunately, this is just a side effect of owning a plastic figure that sweats over time. I have a good friend in chemistry that gave me a phenomenal scientific explanation for greasy action figures.

"The grease is a plasticizer that manufacturers add to the plastic to make the normally brittle plastic a bit more flexible so they are less prone to breaking. The plasticizers slowly leach out of the figure over time though. If the figure is left in the open, the plasticizer just evaporates away (which is why they become more brittle over time) whereas if you have them in a sealed container, only a set amount can evaporate before the container becomes saturated with the vapors, so the remaining plasticizer just remains on the surface of the figure. It will generally feel either oily or sticky. If it is sticky, that probably means that the plasticizer acts as a mild solvent of the plastic and could slowly cause the figure to lose some of it's finer details over time."

-Matthew Davenport, Chemistry PhD

Not all plastics are created equal. Companies/factories will sometimes swap plastics during production to save costs. This is why some figures of the same line will sweat and others will not. The tags/labels included in this post are just a few of the action figure lines where I occasionally come across this sweating problem. If you find your figures greasing up, try my solution! I hope it works for you!

-Chuck