Lately I've noticed that my white polyethelene cutting boards were looking pretty gross. Food stains made them look dingy. This morning I cut blackberries in half for my oatmeal and the berries left the purple stain you see on the board on the left, so I finally decided to do something about it.
Before. Not appealing!
I went online and researched ways to clean white cutting boards and found that pretty much the only way is to use bleach. I filled up both sides of my kitchen sink with enough hot tap water to cover the boards and about a half cup of bleach along with each of my cutting boards. I soaked them for about 25 minutes and then took them out and rinsed them.
In progress. Soaking in stinky bleach.
You can see my results in the last picture, the smaller board on the left is definitely much whiter and almost all the stains are gone. The larger cutting board still has a little bit of stains, but it still looks way better than it did before. I'm glad I finally tried this.
For maximum cleaning and to ensure all the bleach is gone, I put them in the dishwasher. We recently switched to the fancy Cascade complete platinum pacs, they're supposed to be the best rated dishwasher detergent, I think that's according to Consumer Reports magazine. They've been great for getting rid of old hard water deposits on the dog's water bowl and so I've got high hopes for the boards to be a touch whiter/cleaner when they get done.
Hopefully you find this useful and maybe inspiring enough to clean your own cutting boards. Or maybe yours weren't as gross-looking as mine!