Always look after your teeth
- Vicky Harrison
- May 7, 2019
- 6 min read
Always look after your teeth
It’s really important when raising kids is to teach them to look after their teeth, even when they’ve got two sets to play with. So it’s pretty essential to have toothbrushes and toothpaste in your lives. And the default offering of the supermarkets and pharmacies is plastic, plastic, plastic.
Your typical manual toothbrush, which we have always used and thrown away into the black bin of despair, is made of nylon bristles and the handle is likely to be some form polyethylene or polypropylene at a guess (no helpful plastic recycling logos on the packaging). This design hasn’t really changed much since nylon started being used in the 1940s to replace the then bristle of choice, swine bristles (yum). Dental advertising, though, has, as demonstrated by some great Victorian Dentist cards – check out the scary cat extraction one!
When you consider that the population of the world has increased by over 4 billion people since then, that’s so that’s an awful lot of plastic toothbrushes thrown away each year.
You're a pink toothbrush, I'm a blue toothbrush…
You can recycle your plastic toothbrush and but you need to track down someone that will take it off your hands. Colgate has a recycling scheme where you can take your toothbrush, toothpaste and dental floss containers to local shops or schools that collect the products then sends them off to be recycled. Snag is there isn’t one in Wallingford…yet.
Is there an alternative to the plastic toothbrush? This one is actually quite easy to sort out as the bamboo toothbrush is all the rage right now. There are so many sites online are out there where you can get bamboo toothbrushes. Even Boots sell them online at £4 a pop, though disappointingly I haven’t seen any in their shops yet. But Waitrose do sell Humble toothbrushes on the shelf in Wallingford at a penny cheaper than Boots.
We’ve managed to kit the family out with bamboo toothbrushes that are sold in Just Trading at £2.70 each, which granted is probably the cost of two plastic toothbrushes. They are no fuss bamboo handled toothbrushes with white plastic bristles – yep, plastic. It’s tricky to get around this niggle as essentially you’re heading back down to using biodegradable materials like pig and badger hair – try explaining that one to the kids – which act as a bit of a cesspit of unhelpful bacteria. Begrudgingly have to give way to the nylon bristle. But the bamboo handle has kept the kids entertained as we’ve had to decorate them to identify which was whose. Disposing of a used brush is a bit of a slog, as you need to get some pliers and rip all the bristles out (Mr Harrison had much more success / gusto doing this than I did). You are then left with a stick that can go in your garden waste or be used as a plant label in a plant pot.
Is using bamboo a good idea?
A few posts ago, I was looking into natural rubber as a replacement for the artificial rubber used in wellies, and learned that there were a few problems creeping in about mass farming of the rubber plant crop. So, quick reality check, is there a similar issue with bamboo? When I was looking into natural rubber, key red flags were about mono culture farming on a large scale which could also have a bearing on water resources. A quick visit to the Environmental Toothbrush website gives the low down on their bamboo set up:
The handle is made of MOSO bamboo, an environmentally sustainable timber. Bamboo is technically considered a member of the grass family. It is the fastest growing plant on earth, and incredibly abundant. Our bamboo is cultivated for between three to five years, and then harvested. It re-generates itself naturally, with minimal rain and without the need for harmful pesticides. In fact, by harvesting and using the bamboo, we help to control unwanted spread into agricultural and natural forest areas. Our bamboo is grown by many local farmers (NOT PLANTATION).
There is also a Panda appreciation comment that it’s okay for the Giant Panda as apparently, they don’t like eating moso bamboo. Other plus points for bamboo is that it can produce more oxygen than the same acreage of trees and bamboo forest help lock up a lot of carbon dioxide. Bamboo doesn’t die off once it’s been harvested but grows back (hence it can be invasive), which is good for maintaining soils etc. So, a wonder crop basically.
The only red flag I can find so far about bamboo is when it’s taken and used to make fabrics, as there are a lot of chemical processing applied to engineer grass in to fabric. But as this has nothing to do with toothbrushes, I’ll cover that in a later post.
Moving on to Toothpaste
Toothbrush sorted, what about toothpaste? Toothpaste can be a source of two plastic evils. The first is the squeezy plastic tube and the second is the pump action toothpaste tubes are made from a different type of plastic and are easier to recycle than the first lot.
Historically there used to be a third plastic evil with toothpaste in the form of plastic micro beads within the toothpaste, but thankfully due to the UK’s ban on micro beads that kicked in last year, this is now a thing of the past – yay!
The Harrison household have accustomed themselves to the taste of Macleans toothpaste, which sells for around £0.80 for a 100 ml tube. So, research on the alternative to plastic toothpaste. Well one is a metal toothpaste tube instead of metal, but a quick internet search shows the cost for these can be a little steep, ranging from £7 to £10 for a smaller 60 or 75 ml tube – ouch! There are other options out there such as toothpastes that come in a jar, one brand of which is sold in Just Trading at around £7 for 120 g which is a fairly common price for other similar products on the internet – again, ouch!
You can get a solid toothpaste that comes on a stick which you then rub along your toothbrush, which is meant to lasts a while, but costs £10.
Another alternative is tooth powder, but again a quick search shows a big range in price for itty bity jars between £4 and £15, with some of them looking like they come in a plastic jar…
Final alternative is DIY toothpaste. There are a lot of recipes out there, most involving baking soda (sodium hydrogen carbonate) and lots of other random stuff suggested by dentist or simply just baking soda and water. And backing soda often comes in plastic bags or plastic containers – ugh. It does look like there are some places that sell baking soda in paper bags or cardboard boxes typically £4 per kilo, but I think I need to make a trial batch and clear things with my dentist before committing to a bulk buy. Future blog post in the wings…
What to do, what to do?
So, sticking with the shop bought stuff a bit longer. But immense guilt about plastic going in the black bin. However, as I mentioned earlier on there is a Colgate recycling scheme but there wasn’t a local drop off point. Not happy with this situation, I asked about on one of Wallingford’s Facebook groups if there was anyone that wanted to sign up to the scheme. A big result – someone did! KP Stationers in town now have a box where you can deposit your toothpaste tube. Huzah!
Unfortunate news at the dentist….
Unfortunately, a trip to the dentist last month meant more tooth based products – interdental brushes. Perusing what is on offer in Boots, Waitrose or Lloyds pharmacy in Wallingford all sell plastic brushes. Luckily, Boots to sell online interdental brushes that have bamboo handles which can get delivered to the local Boots branch. Couldn’t find anyone else that sold them and didn’t seem to be able to get them from the Humble website either.
Only snag with what was delivered is that they get delivered in an enormous plastic bubble wrap bag!!!!
Cheekily the bag has a big “recycle me” logo on it but no information on what the plastic is or where it can be recycled. Hence a grumpy email has been sent to Boots to moan about this sad state of affairs. Will let you know what they come back with.
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Copy of my grumpy email below:
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Dear Boots,
In an attempt to reduce my plastic waste, I wanted to swap my plastic interdental brush to a bamboo one. It was great that Boots sell Humble’s bamboo interdental brushes, though only online. I ordered these but was very frustrated to find that they were delivered in a plastic bag to my local branch of Boots in Wallingford. Even more annoying the plastic bag had a “please recycle me” message but there is nothing on the bag to say what type of plastic it is or where it can be recycled. This is not very helpful.
In an ideal world, it would be great if these were sold on the shelf so that I could forego the need for the plastic bag in the first place. Is there anyway to make this happen?
As Boots are keen to see their bags recycled, is it possible that Boots can take their plastic bags back in their shops to be recycled on their behalf?
I look forward to hearing from you soon on your thoughts.
Kind regards
Victoria Harrison.
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