Going Green in a Brush

Curiously Green is an exclusive weekly Earth 911 series showcasing the adventures of a couple going green. This week Sheila and Gary, a couple from Phoenix, Arizona share their experience buying environmentally-friendly toothbrushes.

Sheila Bocchine is a pinhole photographer and Gary Millard is a Phoenix photographer.

She Says: We tend to get new toothbrushes every three months. I don’t know what brand of toothbrush we were using before, but I really liked it and had been using it for about three years now. This time I went to Wild Oats and perused its toothbrush section. I read the packaging and looked at the prices and decided to go with Preserve Toothbrush, made by Recycline.

The shape of the toothbrush is curved and took a little getting used to. The head of the toothbrush is smaller than my last one but doesn’t seem to bother me. Overall, I like the toothbrush, although after a month of using it, I’m still getting used used to it.

I went with this product because the packing says it’s made from 100% recycled plastics, including recycled yogurt cups (they have a partnership with Stonyfield Farm, and use its recycled yogurt cups); packaging is in reusable travel case (we went to Bisbee, AZ over Labor Day Weekend and were happy to have the travel case packaging); Preserve toothbrush and case are completely recyclable with a postage-paid mailer (the packaging says to request the mailer from its website, but lucky for me, they had the postage-paid mailers right next to the toothbrushes at Wild Oats).

P.S. Recycline.com if you read this, you should add Earth911.com as one of your links!

He Says: Toothbrushes weren’t even on my recycling radar until Sheila brought home recycled toothbrushes from Recycline. U.S. Census puts the population at 302,773,034 on September 2nd, 2007. If every American throws away at least one toothbrush a year (or if they are like Sheila one every month) . . . that my friends, is a lot of toothbrushes.

More importantly that’s a lot of plastic that’s being thrown away. Primarily made out of Polypropylene, toothbrushes are highly recyclable. Polypropylene is used in a wide variety of products such as carpet fibers, automotive bumpers, microwave containers and of course, toothbrushes.

The toothbrushes themselves are made out of 65% Stonyfield Farm yogurt cups. The company says it goes to great extremes to make sure that the recycled product is clean and sanitized. Which is important since the recycled product is going into your mouth. Recycline recycles the used toothbrush and the mail-in-case into plastic lumber products, like park benches.

The toothbrush itself was a little awkward at first, because of its curved design bending the head of the toothbrush back, instead of forward. The opposite of a toothbrush like the Reach, which boasted it was shaped like a dental instrument. The soft bristles are just what my dentist has been telling me for years, “Use soft bristles and quit brushing so hard.”

The actual brush seemed a little small, especially since my last toothbrush had a giant brush with extra large plastic bristles on the side. It was like brushing your teeth with a scrub brush. I have adjusted to the smaller brush area, and the bent back design seems to be just as effective as the Reach toothbrush for getting after those molars.

Sheila Bocchine and Gary Millard are both Phoenix photographers.