Sometimes I use my dishwasher to thoroughly clean inserts and sections of -lug trays that I re-use. I always get the soil and visible stains off first, by spraying, soaking and scrubbing.
Then I fill the dishwasher as full as I can with 6-pack inserts, plastic pots and sections of trays. I add detergent manually so that every part of the cycle becomes a "wash" cycle. I seem to have a pre-rinse, then a pre-wash, then the main wash, then a rinse cycle. Instead I turn those into 4 wash cycles, and do the rinsing outdoors with a hose set to "mist" or "flat spray".
Each batch of trays and inserts gets 5-7 minutes of washing, then I remove that batch and put the next batch in. I can get 5-6 batches through one dishwasher cycle.
The bleach rinse might get them more nearly sterile, but the dishwasher does get them very clean.
P.S. Modern "laundry bleach" is an oxygen-based "bleach" and very weak tea compared to traditional BLEACH (sodium hypochlorite). If you want to sanitize or sterilize something, you want traditional Chlorine-based bleach. If a jug says "laundry bleach", read the fine print and look for "sodium hypochlorite" (effective for sterilizing things) and anything else, usually starting "oxy-", which does not kill microbes.
