TLDR You may be able to use a rice cooker, instant pot or pressure cooker to sanitize disposable masks after wearing them, although this will slightly damage the mask.
Due to the worldwide mask shortage, it seems inevitable that many people are going to have to reuse masks. Personally I have 2 masks per member of my household which seems troubling low.
Takeaway—here are the 5 methods in the first paper:
Rice Cooker
Autoclave (similar to pressure cooker)
10-minute submersion in 70% ethanol
10-minute submersion in 100% isopropanol
10-minute submersion in 0.5% bleach solution
All methods of decontamination damaged the masks. It seems that alcohol and bleach significantly damaged overall filter quality (ratio 0.30 to original), but rice cooker and autoclave relatively preserved it (0.98 to original). I can’t see the results for the IPA method on their chart but I expect it to be similar to the other chemical methods.
The other paper on sanitizing efficiency also looked at UVC and UVA light. It found “Bleach, UVC, an autoclave, and a <rice cooker> provide better biocidal efficacy than ethanol and UVA”.
My conclusion in this is that rice cookers, pressure cookers and especially the instant pot—which offer comparable performance to commercial autoclaves can be used in an emergency situation to sterilize masks for a few uses. Be very careful about the way you don and doff the mask and handle them generally.
The CDC recommends using ”...a cleanable face shield (preferred) or a surgical mask over an N95 respirator...” for extended use or reuse. This may make it more difficult to breathe, but perhaps worth trying. Surgical masks are also not so available these days, but maybe something like a bandana or other covering would also help protect the mask.
TLDR You may be able to use a rice cooker, instant pot or pressure cooker to sanitize disposable masks after wearing them, although this will slightly damage the mask.
Due to the worldwide mask shortage, it seems inevitable that many people are going to have to reuse masks. Personally I have 2 masks per member of my household which seems troubling low.
It may be possible to decontaminate masks—I found a paper that reviewed 5 mask decontamination methods, both a review of how they affected the mask, and a review of how effective they were at decontaminating. The papers are very technical, so please double-check my interpretation
Takeaway—here are the 5 methods in the first paper:
Rice Cooker
Autoclave (similar to pressure cooker)
10-minute submersion in 70% ethanol
10-minute submersion in 100% isopropanol
10-minute submersion in 0.5% bleach solution
All methods of decontamination damaged the masks. It seems that alcohol and bleach significantly damaged overall filter quality (ratio 0.30 to original), but rice cooker and autoclave relatively preserved it (0.98 to original). I can’t see the results for the IPA method on their chart but I expect it to be similar to the other chemical methods.
The other paper on sanitizing efficiency also looked at UVC and UVA light. It found “Bleach, UVC, an autoclave, and a <rice cooker> provide better biocidal efficacy than ethanol and UVA”.
My conclusion in this is that rice cookers, pressure cookers and especially the instant pot—which offer comparable performance to commercial autoclaves can be used in an emergency situation to sterilize masks for a few uses. Be very careful about the way you don and doff the mask and handle them generally.
The CDC recommends using ”...a cleanable face shield (preferred) or a surgical mask over an N95 respirator...” for extended use or reuse. This may make it more difficult to breathe, but perhaps worth trying. Surgical masks are also not so available these days, but maybe something like a bandana or other covering would also help protect the mask.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/hcwcontrols/recommendedguidanceextuse.html