The Environmental Impact of your Plastic Toothbrush.

"It's only one toothbrush," said 8 billion people: the environmental impact of your plastic toothbrush.

On a journey towards sustainable living, it’s easy to dismiss making the little changes – such as swapping a plastic toothbrush for a more sustainable bamboo one. In the short term, it may seem like these swaps don’t make much of a difference – but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The best way to improve the overall environmental impact of humanity is if we all take small steps to reduce our individual impact.

It’s not just one plastic toothbrush - let’s put the one plastic toothbrush into a global, long term perspective. Every year, 50 million pounds of plastic toothbrushes end up in the landfill just in the US alone. Aside from sitting in landfills, an increasing number is polluting the ocean.

If we each substitute our plastic toothbrush for a bamboo one, we could eliminate this source of waste.

A plastic toothbrush is rarely recycled - there are some exceptions – but most commercially available plastic toothbrushes can’t be recycled. That’s because they’re increasingly being made of composite plastics, which are near impossible to recycle efficiently.

However, even if we could recycle all toothbrushes efficiently, we need to remember that most plastic is only ever recycled once before it becomes unrecyclable!

Let’s take steps to make our purchases more intentional and sustainable. This one change can make a whole lot of difference in the long run.

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