The Preserve Toothbrush
This is a post about a toothbrush. It doesn't have batteries or some sort of built in toothpaste dispenser. What it does have is free postage so it can be disposed of in an environmentally better way.
How often do we get a new toothbrush (plastic) and toss the packaging (plastic) and the old one (plastic) in the trash (landfill)? The Preserve Toothbrush eliminates the waste in all of those steps.
- The brush is made from recycled yogurt cups
- The package is a pre-paid mailer for your old brush
- That gets shipped back to Preserve to get recycled.
Ideas and products like this make a difference for our environment. How big?
Supposedly, every year the United States alone throws away 50 million pounds of toothbrushes. [citation] Recycling 1 ton of plastic saves 7.4 cubic yards of landfill space. [citation]
50,000,000 pounds = 25,000 short tons = 185,000 cubic yards
A quad axle dump truck like this one can hold about 16 cubic yards of material. 
That's 11,562 and 1/2 truckloads of plastic. That's not even counting the amount of diesel fuel used to transport all that plastic.
If you put all that plastic together in a 3 foot high six foot wide berm it would stretch 52 miles. [citation]
Fifty-two miles. Of toothbrushes. Each year. Just in The United States.
So something small like developing, producing, and selling a toothbrush that comes in a container that takes care of it's own disposal adds up to big savings.
It's $2.99. Seems worth it to me.