DOWN WITH THAT DUSTER
When it comes to tackling household dust, there isn’t a tool much better than a microfibre cloth – its invention in the 1980s put paid to feather dusters. These cloths are made from microscopic synthetic fibres that are 10 to 50 times thinner than a human hair, with each fibre being between three and five microns in diameter. A single cloth contains millions of these fibres, able to attach to and lift the tiniest of dust particles by using a weak electrostatic force called van der Waals force. This creates an attraction between the dust and cloth, causing the dust particles to latch onto the fibres, where they will remain until the cloth is heated during washing, where the fibre relaxes slightly and releases the dust.