You probably don’t give your toothbrush a second thought once it’s past its best use. Throw it in the bin, see ya! But add them all up and that’s some landfill space every year being taken up by our old plastic toothbrushes. To combat that, Oral-B has partnered with Shaver Shop to encourage us to recycle.
The national initiative allows you to drop old toothbrushes into your local Shaver Shop, but also using a pre-paid return envelope supplied with online orders going forward.
Zulfiqar Mahar, Vice President of Marketing and Commercial Operations at P&G (Oral-B) said: “Every year, millions of toothbrushes are tossed in the garbage bin because they can’t be recycled at home through regular kerbside recycling. That’s millions of toothbrushes that are making their way to landfill.”
“At Oral-B, we want to help people protect the planet, as well as their smiles, which is why we’re proud to be partnering with Veolia to launch our DROP SWAP SMILE initiative. Backed by Veolia’s expertise in e-waste recycling and innovative end-of-life solutions, DROP SWAP SMILE gives Australians a new way to dispose of their old toothbrushes and divert them from landfill.”
It’s basically mobile muster for Toothbrushes – instead of taking your phones to a telco and finding the Mobile Muster bin, you take toothbrushes to Shaver Shop and look for the DROP SWAP SMILE collection bins.
Now the Swap part of the brand is a bit misleading, as there’s no swapping involved, but they are of course hoping you’ll upgrade to a new electric toothbrush, which over the course of time has less of an impact on the environment and landfill, especially if recycled itself.
You can drop in your “manual” or plastic toothbrushes, as well as electric toothbrush handles, chargers and brush heads.
From a what happens next perspective, Ross Drummett from Veolia, said “Toothbrushes are considered hard-to-recycle because they require dedicated sorting processes to separate and treat the materials they’re made of. As household collections don’t allow for this, it’s crucial that Australia adopts innovative disposal schemes that capture hard-to-recycle items separately, where they can be recycled and treated properly, instead of ending up in landfills.”
“Working closely with Oral-B and Shaver Shop, our team of experts will collect, sort and process used toothbrushes, ensuring their parts are either recycled or diverted from landfill. The individual efforts of consumers who use this program will make a big collective difference. We hope that many people get involved and join us on the journey towards ecological transformation.”
Not a bad idea at all. For those of us in households where we’re trying to do everything we can in this space, it just means another “bucket” of things:). We’ve got soft plastics, batteries, electronics, bottle caps, return and earn bottles, recycling and rubbish – and probably some I don’t know about:)
