Can Tide Pens Expire?

Before Tide pens arrived on the market in 2005, spilling a little something on yourself during lunch was a way bigger deal. You had to sprint to the bathroom, dab your shirt with a paper towel that seemed intent on dissolving, and just hope and pray you could remember the best stain removal solutions. But then, there was suddenly a way to erase stains without even leaving the table. Tide pens are a great thing to carry with you for these moments. However, unless you are particularly messy, it's likely you aren't using it every single day. So just how long do you have to use a Tide pen before it expires? There isn't a set use by date for the product, although it's recommended that you replace yours every two years. That said, each pen only has about 10 to 20 uses in it, so it's possible it will be used up well before this time, anyway. 

While you don't need to throw your unfinished pen out right at the two year mark, if you notice it's not working as well, then it's time to dispose of it. Luckily, you can just toss Tide pens directly into the trash. There isn't anything toxic in the ingredients list that requires any special steps for disposal. Although parts of the pen are plastic, you can't recycle it traditionally because of the microfiber tip, as most machines will reject mixed materials. 

Tide pens don't magically stop working at the two year mark. Just that their ingredients could potentially become less effective as time goes on, so they won't work as well. This is because the main ingredient in Tide pens is hydrogen peroxide, orH₂O₂, which is quite unstable. It decomposes over time to become water and oxygen gas. This process doesn't take exactly two years; instead, its length varies based on the amount of the substance present and how the product is stored. However, since the pen isn't typically left open all the time or for long, the deterioration rate isn't very quick. Yet as it occurs, it makes the ingredient less and less effective. So if your Tide pen is older than two years, you can still use it — it just might not remove the stain entirely. 

The hydrogen peroxide inside the pen is doing a lot of the heavy lifting to get rid of the stains, which should earn it a spot as one of the iconic cleaning products that has a cult following. However, while there are plenty of common laundry stains you can fix using hydrogen peroxide, Tide pens have a few other supporting ingredients as well to make things more efficient. The pens also contain water itself, plus a little bit of Epsom salt to help things dry, yet the salt and water don't degrade over time like H₂O₂, so you don't need to worry about them.