Plastic Toothbrushes and Elephants… both take up a lot of space!

The average person will change their toothbrush, three or four times every year and individually, that doesn’t seem like too much to be adding to landfill; but on a national or even global scale the figures are mind boggling!

In Australia alone, over 30 million plastic toothbrushes, representing approximately one thousand tonnes of waste, are discarded and end up in land fill every single year; (imagine 400 elephants stacked on top of each other!) and that’s just in Australia… imagine what that figure would be if we added the numbers from Europe, China, America and the rest of the world into the equation too!

Plastic toothbrushes are made from a combination of crude oil plastic and rubber for the hand piece, nylon for the bristles, and a mixture of plastic and cardboard for the packaging. Currently none of these items are biodegradable, therefore they remain in landfill indefinitely. Worse, they end up in our oceans, washed up on our beaches or consumed by marine life. If they are burnt, they release a combination of toxic and greenhouse gases which are hazardous to people and the environment.

Invented by a Brisbane dentist, The Environmental Toothbrush is a simple and affordable solution that my family has been using for about four years now! Made from panda friendly bamboo, a natural cellulose fibre, the handles are biodegradable, environmentally sustainable, and do not pollute the environment. The amazing quick growth and self-renewing ability of bamboo means that deforestation is not necessary and bamboo is such a resilient plant that farmers don’t need to spray them with pesticides or fertilizers, which is always a good thing. Even the packaging they come in is bio-degradable.

Once finished with the toothbrush can be buried in the garden, composted, or added to landfill, where it will completely biodegrade into the soil, without causing any pollution which makes it a small change that, if enough people do, will create a BIG impact!

It’s a small change you can make with your small change! Get your Environmental Toothbrush from the Healthy Clean and Green shop today.

There’s no colour choice, so we simply use a permanent marker to initial our toothbrushes!