Ha, that is a good answer. Even something like International Children’s Festival, or the Fayette County Fair, where we were using the LUG’s own Lego supply, we went through tons of hand sanitizer. For awhile I bought more every time I went to Walmart, just in case.
I’ve never used the Block bags, I don’t have any and I don’t know where to get them. I used to use Scrubbing Bubbles, it’s easy and effective but it’s also expensive, especially if you’re cleaning a large volume of pieces. So I’ve switched to simply using dish soap, which is super cheap. One container of soap and water to swish them around in, one container of water to rinse.
I don’t know if it holds true for other soaps, but I should point out that I learned the hard way that prolonged exposure to Scrubbing Bubbles ruins Lego, it makes them brittle and they split apart. After that I never let them sit for more than 5 minutes before rinsing, and it was fine, but one time I washed a minifig that was dirty and let her sit overnight in the bubbles, and when I reassembled her the next day, her neck sheared right through her head.
A couple years later I tried something different – I had smallish spaceships on display in my house, so they’d become very dusty, and I didn’t want to take them apart yet. So I washed them with Scrubbing Bubbles and then rinsed them as thoroughly as I could. It didn’t work, I don’t know if there were a few places that either I nonetheless missed, or it was places where the soap just got in and wouldn’t wash out, cause stuff started to split apart, including some assembled minifigs. I ended up taking everything apart anyway and doing another full rinse piece by piece.
Fortunately my overall losses were pretty small. I know these are boring stories but had things gone differently, the losses could’ve been catastrophic (I didn’t lose anything that was too expensive to replace, too rare to replace, or had sentimental value), so I wanna make sure nobody else makes the same mistakes I did.