Jun 16, 20212 min read

More than a billion plastic tubes per year?!

Updated: Aug 10, 2021

Around a billion toothpaste plastic tubes end up in the garbage every year. You don't believe me? Let's do some numbers. Each year you use at least 8 toothpaste tubes. In the planet there are 7 billion people. If only one billion actually wash their teeth, that is at least 8 billion tubes PER YEAR!.

Alarming, right? And it's even more startling that these plastic tubes take from 300 to 400 years to decompose. This is why the very first toothpaste tube you used in your life, is still somewhere out there.

The components that make up the regular toothpaste tube can include any number of plastics, aluminum, steel, and even nylon. To recycle a toothpaste tube, each of these components must be processed separately. So in addition to the CO2 pollution involved in the production of each individual tube, it becomes a very complicated process for recyclers. So practically no toothpaste tube is ever recycled.

The very first toothpaste tube you used in your life, is still somewhere out there.

Fortunately, there is a recycling company specialized in something others shy away from: difficult-to-recycle materials such as plastic toothpaste tubes and toothbrushes. This company is called TerraCycle. The firm already operates in 21 countries, including Mexico, where it has five recycling programs: soap wrappers, snacks, cookies, oral care products and hard plastics collected from beaches.

"That's great news, right?" Yes, but we must remember the amount of garbage that we produce. TerraCycle is the only company dedicated to this type of recycling and barely 15% of the difficult-to-recycle products are actually recycled. So millions of tubes continue to pollute our oceans and soils or end up being incinerated, which generates greenhouse gases, damaging the atmosphere.

If we knew the real numbers for the amount of garbage that is generated per year, perhaps we would begin to think differently.

It's time to look for alternatives to help have a cleaner planet without neglecting our oral health. There are more and more brands that offer you this benefit, one of them is our brand. TeethTab are chewable tablets, delivered in a glass jar for the first time. We encourage the refill system of our tablets so less waste is produced. This can be through our website or through our TeethTab refill stations. Find out about all the benefits we offer you in the "About Us" section on our website. With TeethTab as the alternative, we will have cleaner and healthier beaches and teeth.