The great thing about plastic or garden furniture is that it requires little or no care. However, resin does fade, and excessive summer heat can make some plastics become brittle. This brittleness can be made worse by abrasive cleaners because minute scouring fragments in the cleaner can scratch the plastic leaving it with a slightly rough surface. To prevent this, wash down plastic tables and chairs with a mild all-purpose cleaner - the same one you would use for vinyl floors indoors or for washing down walls, rather than kitchen or bathroom cleaners. If possible store plastic furniture in the shade or indoors rather than leaving it out, this prolongs its life and reduces the tendency to brittleness.
In addition, when white plastic ages, it can become yellow. If your furniture gets to this stage, you may have to give in and use a mildly abrasive cleaner. You can use a pressure washer in spring to get rid of any black grime that has embedded itself in the rough edges of the plastic. Soaking really stubborn stains in a strong bleach solution also helps whiten plastic it but doesn't give the same guarantee of uniform results as a pressure hose. If you use bleach, rinse the solution off after 30 minutes.
A last resort to restoring whiteness to discoloured garden furniture is spray paint. Look for a specialist paint to match the colour of your furniture, test a small area first, then spray the entire front of the affected chair. Or chose another colour entirely and update your garden look by re-spraying the entire set blue or yellow.
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