Is it safe to use glass cooktop cleaner to clean and polish stainless steel pots?

Question

My glass cooktop cleaner has abrasive materials and other components which are very effective when cleaning the hob: grease, burnt and solid stuff...

I thought this could be used to clean and polish pots too. I tried with an old pot and the results look amazing (I didn't take a picture before, but it didn't look like that at all):

The question is: is it safe to use?

While rubbing I could see the abrasive material's effect: once the grease and rust was gone the cloth started becoming gray like the pot, presumably from the steel particles that were being removed. I made sure to clean it up a couple of times with water and soap to remove all those particles, so I guess that would not be a problem. But maybe other components could damage the pot in the long term, or worse, be unsafe for cooking?

Update (ingredients)

• <5% Nonionic surfactants
• Perfumes
• Limonene
• Benzisothiazolinone
• Methylchloroisothiazolinone
• Methylisothiazolinone
• 2-bromo-2-nitropropane-1.3-diol

The sticker literally says "Among other things", so I hope they are harmless if they are allowed to omit them. :-D

Answer 1

It depends on the abrasive.

In the USA, there is a class of "soft abrasives" designed for effective scrubbing while not scratching cookware and barware. This includes the brands Bon Ami and Barkeeper's Friend. These, and abrasives like them, can be used on most cookware, and certainly on any kind of steel.

Harsher abrasives, such as Comet Bleach Powder and Ajax, are designed for cleaning porcelain and will scratch most cookware and even some kinds of glass. You can use them on anodized aluminum coated cookware, because the coating is basically corundum (and this a hardness of 8). However, even for these, harsh abrasives will wear down the coating over the years, eventually stripping it off (based on my personal experience).

The cleaner you linked to is probably fine for steel, since it contains no harsh base chemicals; the strongest surfactant is limonene. The only thing that would make it not-safe would be a silica-based or corundum-based scrubbing agent.

Please also see discussion in the comments regarding calcium carbonate as a scrubbing agent, and why Comet and Ajax are harsh (because of strong basic chemicals).

Answer 2

I would not worry about use of abrasives on stainless steel cookware, especially fine abrasives such as found in cleaning products. I might not go around scrubbing my stainless steel pots with crushed basalt or anything like that, but frankly even that is likely at most to only leave unsightly scratches that don't really affect the performance of the cookware.

A fine abrasive may rub off an exceedingly thin layer of metal. But I wouldn't expect this to significantly reduce the lifetime of the cookware, in terms of removing material.

More to the point, stainless steel is an alloy that is homogeneous throughout. If you remove a little bit, there is more right underneath that will soon oxidize and recreate the "passive" layer that makes the metal "stainless". There is a small possibility that surface contamination will interfere with the passivation process after you clean it, but in my experience this just doesn't happen with the stainless alloys used for cookware. And if it does, you can generally just scrub it again.