The Whole Tooth and Nothing But the Tooth: A Compostable Toothbrush!

I was very excited when the postie arrived this morning with a parcel for me.  You would have thought it was my birthday by the 'oohs' and 'aahs' as I opened up the jiffy bag.  Inside were three wondrous things: Bamboo toothbrushes for the whole family!


I am all for being an active environmentalist, but I also want to be hygienic and clean! So I needed to find a way to replace my plastic toothbrush, (which I bin every three months), with a sustainable alternative.  Those toothy-pegs are important!

Thankfully the good people at Environmental Toothbrush in Australia were on the case already.

A toothbrush seems like a pretty small item to get het-up about right?  After all, how much landfill can they be creating?  Well, did you know that in Australia they dump 30 million toothbrushes every year?  And if you bear in mind that Australia's population is roughly a third of the UK's, you can estimate that here in the UK we are sending 90 million toothbrushes to landfill each year.  Which is roughly 3000 tons of landfill! 

What a lot of unnecessary waste, right?  Which was why I was so delighted to get my hands on my very own sustainable and compostable bamboo toothbrush!

And the pandas are happy too!

Bamboo grows at a rate of knots (my own bamboo hedge is determined to take over my entire front garden!), needs minimal water (unlike cotton) and don't worry, it isn't harvested from panda habitats!  It seems to be a great material and much, much, much better than petrochemicals.

The only downside is that the brushes aren't made in the UK.  But my current plastic toothbrushes aren't made here either.  So by my reckoning it is a great alternative.  Myself and No.1 Son have both used our new toothbrushes and can report that the are top-notch!
 
I ordered mine from Beneficial Health  at a cost of about £3.30 each (including VAT and postage), or you can bulk buy direct from Environmental Toothbrush which works out much cheaper per brush.

I am going to try and get my local Health Food store to stock them and from there they can take over the world!

If you are interested in reading more, the marvellous Mrs Green over at My Zero Waste Toothbrushes has done a thorough low-down on eco-toothcare!