Is the Zielonka smell buster woo?

[AgeGap]

This may belong in 'General Skepticism and The Paranormal' but is this (http://www.vitalia-health.co.uk/acatalog/Classic_Smell_Killer.html) woo or is there some science behind it.

[wahrheit]

The link you gave is full of woo language, and all it says is that this thingy is made of stainless steel (and mentioning a "patent", without source of course). I wouldn't know how steel kills smell, so for the time being I'd label this "woo".

[Fnord]

Zielonka is a town in Wołomin County, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland.

I sense an ethnic joke in the works.

[AgeGap]

Perhaps not the best site to illustrate what it does. You half submerge it in water and somehow the water/air/steel interface does something to the smelly compounds when they make contact. Or something. I thought febreze was woo when I first saw it so I don't want to show my cards yet as to whether it is woo or not..

[ben m]

This is an old thing---supposedly, steel serves as a catalyst for oxidizing the odor of (specifically) garlic. That's reasonably plausible---metal surfaces are catalysts for many things. Methane and oxygen will combine at room temperature (no ignition source) in the presence of platinum, for example. The most famous metal/food interactions, like the egg whites thing, aren't actually catalysis (see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v308/n5960/abs/308667a0.html
for example), but whatever.

However, searching for actual studies of steel catalyzing garlic odor oxidation, I can't find anything. The closest thing to a hard-science result is http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v308/n5960/abs/308667a0.html.

So it may be an old wives' tale, but it's not something Zielonka is making up. I've only heard it as a "rub your hands on it" deodorizer, not a "leave in the fridge". That's a new one.

[casebro]

Rubbing you hands on stainless steel does work. I use the sink, especially the difider in a double sink. In the fridge, I suppose a stainless pan with a bit of water in it would do?

[fuelair]

ASFAIK - and as far as a reasonable internet search goes - it works fine for garlic but not odors in general - and must contact the odorized surface to do that..

http://www.recipetips.com/glossary-term/t--33339/garlic.asp and several similar.

The active agent is nickel, not iron, so presumably a bar of nickel woul be better.

[Jeff Corkern]

It's faintly reasonable for some of the smells mentioned, that could conceivably react on steel surfaces, like garlic and onion smell, but I drag my feet when it comes to motor oil.

The garlic and onion smells come from disulfide compounds, compounds that have an -S-S- linkage in them. Disulfide linkages are NOT very stable. They'll break in a heartbeat.

Even still, it's probably not worth the money, because it's going to be slow. The molecules have to diffuse through the air and land on the surface to be broken up. This is going to be a s-l-o-w process.

I can't see a way for the motor oil removal to work. Those are basically just carbon-hydrogen molecules and they are NOT reactive. There's a bit of a con there. You'll note they say rub your hands on it for sixty seconds. You rub your hands on ANYTHING for sixty seconds and you'll substantially reduce any smell. Not by decomposing the compound, but by simple friction and rubbing the layer of skin off that has the smell on it.