Many types of plants have thick, viscous, or gummy sap or resin in their stalks and other parts, and when trimming, pruning, or harvesting, the shearing or cutting tools used often accumulate sticky residues which can in turn pick up other foreign matter such as dust, fines, or clippings. Over time the tool becomes increasing difficult to use or to control safely, halting the work while the tool is cleaned. Currently there are a number of methods used to attempt to clean off sticky residue from shears, pruners, or gardening scissors. One of set of methods involves soaking a fouled tool or at least the cutting blades or edges of the tool in a cleaning solution, or oil impregnated sand, or other sorts and mixtures of solvents or abrasives, but these methods fail to satisfy market needs because of how long the trimmers need to be soaked or cycled within the cleaning medium, and the additional steps required to remove gritty abrasive cleaners before returning the tool to service.
Attempts to sharpen gummed up plant trimming shears are often inadequate because although sharpening may remove gummy residue and foreign matter from the immediate area of the tool's cutting surfaces, the rest of the tool will remain substantially fouled. Worse, gummy residues transferred to the sharpening tool will impede subsequent sharpening attempts. Eventually both the cutting tools and the sharpening tools alike will still need to be cleaned.
Working on resinous plants with cutting or pruning tools requires more frequent instances of cleaning and sharpening the tools, and it is often attempted to devise portable cleaning and sharpening tools which can be worn by a gardener or field worker or kept close by a site where pruning, cutting, or harvesting is in progress.
Cleaning scissors by hand usually requires rags, open containers of solvents and presents uses with cutting hazards. Contaminated rags may contribute to impurities in valuable products. Where cleaning solvents are used, evaporation, odors, ventilation contribute additional challenges and opportunities for hazards and waste, and users may be exposed to undesired contact with these cleaning agents and plant materials or their extracts suspended therein in the event of a spill or a leak.
Where purity of plant extracts is an objective, contamination becomes a concern because a used rag can transfer contaminants or fine matter between supposedly clean tools. When harvesting plants for medical compounds, people who clean the cutting tools risk receiving a transfer of active agents in plant oils into the body, which can precipitate allergic reactions or an unintended dose of psychotropic medicinal compounds, or unwanted hormonal responses to chemicals intended to alleviate medical conditions not present in an affected user.