How your toothbrush became a part of the plastic crisis about:reader?url=https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/201...

nationalgeographic.com

How your toothbrush became a part of

the plastic crisis
PUBLISHED June 14, 2019
12-16 minutes

This article was created in partnership with the National

Geographic Society.

At first, years ago, it was just an occasional piece of plastic trash

that Kahi Pacarro, the founder of Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii,
picked up on the beach cleanups he organized around the state. A
straw here, a takeout container there. But one day Pacarro spotted
something particularly surprising in the beach detritus: a
toothbrush.

Now, in any given Hawaii beach cleanup, he says, it’s not

uncommon to pick up 20 or even 100 toothbrushes.

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View Images

In the early 20th century manufacturers started substituting nylon

and other plastics into toothbrush design, and a star was born.
Image by Hannah Whitaker, National Geographic

The reason is simple. The total number of plastic toothbrushes

being produced, used, and thrown away each year has grown
steadily since the first one was made in the 1930s.

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“I like to ask people, what’s the first thing you touch in the morning?
It’s probably your toothbrush,” says Pacarro. “Do you want the first
thing you touch every day to be plastic?”

For centuries, the basic toothbrush was made from natural

materials. But during the early 20th century, the giddy early days of
plastic innovation, manufacturers started substituting nylon and
other plastics into the design—and never looked back.

Plastic has so fully infiltrated toothbrush design that it’s nearly

impossible to clean our teeth without touching a polymer. And
because plastic is essentially indestructible, that means nearly
every single toothbrush made since the 1930s is still out there in
the world somewhere, living on as a piece of trash.

Now, some designers are looking for ways to reimagine this crucial,
classic object in a way that puts less stress on the planet. But to
find solutions to the toothbrush conundrum, we have to understand
how we got here.

The best invention of all time?

It turns out people really love having clean teeth. In MIT’s 2003
Lemelson Innovation Index survey, the toothbrush rated higher than
cars, personal computers, or cellphones as the innovation
respondents couldn’t live without.

Humans have apparently felt this way for a very long time.
Archaeologists have found “tooth sticks” in Egyptian tombs. The
Buddha chewed sticks into fluffy-ended scrubbers to clean his
teeth. The Roman author Pliny the Elder noted that “it makes teeth
firm to pick them with a porcupine quill,” and the Roman poet Ovid
proclaimed that it was a good idea to wash the teeth each morning.

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Tooth care even occupied the mind of the reigning Chinese

emperor Hongzhi in the late 1400s, who designed something that
looked a lot like the brush we know today. It featured a short, dense
pack of boar bristles, shaved off the neck of a hog, set into a bone
or wood handle.

That simple design endured, essentially unchanged, for centuries—

but not for everyone. Boar bristles and bone handles were fancy,
expensive materials, meaning that only the wealthy could afford
brushes. Everyone else had to make do with chew sticks, scraps of
cloth, their fingers, or nothing at all. As late as the early 1920s, only
an estimated one in four people in the United States owned a
toothbrush.

planet or plastic?

1. Try out bamboo brushes—and dispose of them correctly!

2. Choose a brush with a reusable handle.

3. Write to your favorite company and ask them to develop plastic-

free options.

War changes everything

It wasn’t until late in the 19th century that the concept of tooth care
for everyone, rich and poor alike, started to trickle into the public
consciousness. One of the drivers of that transition was war.

Around the time of the American Civil War in the mid-1800s, guns
were loaded one shot at a time, with powder and bullets that had
been pre-wrapped in twists of heavy paper. Soldiers needed to tear
the twists open with their teeth, but many potential fighters lacked

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even the six well-anchored opposing teeth to rip the paper apart.
This was obviously a problem.

The few dentists serving the Union Army despaired at the state of
the teeth around them, but dental care failed to take hold as a
priority for the North. The Confederate Army, in contrast,
conscripted a cadre of dentists who stressed preventative care; one
army dentist pushed the message so successfully that soldiers in
his unit shoved their toothbrushes in their buttonholes, readily
available at all times.

It took two more major military mobilizations to get toothbrushes

into nearly every bathroom. By the advent of World War I, the U.S.
military recognized that they had a problem, a variant on the
cartridge-ripping issue from the Civil War. The otherwise healthy
young men they wanted to recruit into service needed six healthy
opposing teeth in order to eat the tough, dry military rations. Young
man after young man failed that test.

“It’s a little unbelievable, looking from today’s vantage point,” says

Alyssa Picard, a historian and the author of Making the American
Mouth. “[The military] had a standard, and it’s pretty basic—have
six teeth in your mouth so you can chew—and people are not
meeting those standards. People who would otherwise be available
for fighting? Off the list.”

By World War II, soldiers were instructed in the care and keeping of
teeth; dentists were embedded in battalions and toothbrushes were
handed out to troops. And when the fighters came home, they
brought their tooth-brushing habits with them.

‘The right road to American citizenship’

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Simultaneously, across the country cultural expectations around

teeth were changing. Bad teeth, dentists believed, could be signs of
disease, poor nutrition, and general disregard for personal hygiene.
“[Dentists] saw themselves as the ministers of the health-care
process,” says Picard—not just caretakers of the mouth, but of the
whole body, and even of the public health writ large.

Dental experts started framing the question of dental care as a

social, moral, and even patriotic issue. Public campaigns touting
the benefits of healthy teeth spread across the country. “If bad teeth
could be prevented,” one dentist opined in 1904, “the gain to the
state and individual would be of tremendous value, as it is
wonderful how many diseases can be traced indirectly to bad
teeth.”

In many cases those campaigns were targeted at poor, immigrant,

or otherwise marginalized populations. Dental hygiene was often
wielded as a way to “Americanize” communities the primarily white
dental professionals at the time saw as not fully assimilated into the
dominant culture, according to Picard.

“I know that a clean mouth and a talk on hygiene has started many
[immigrant coal miners] on the right road to good American
citizenship,” said one Pennsylvania dentist in the early 20th century.

The plastic takeover

As demand for toothbrushes soared, production followed, aided by

the development of exciting new materials called plastics.

In the early 1900s chemists discovered that they could make a

strong, glossy, moldable—and occasionally explosive—material
from a mixture of nitrocellulose and camphor, a fragrant, oily

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substance derived from the camphor laurel tree. The material,

called “celluloid,” could be made into shapes practical, fanciful, and
cheap, perfect for toothbrush handles.

Soon, bristles also succumbed to the siren song of synthetics. In

1938 a Japanese national laboratory came up with a fine, silky
substance it hoped would be a substitute for the silk used to make
more durable parachutes for its military. Nearly simultaneously, the
U.S-based DuPont chemical company rolled out its own smooth,
thin-fibered material: nylon.

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View Images

Many toothbrushes are unrecyclable, because the composite

plastics most are now made of are difficult, if not impossible, to
break apart efficiently. Image by Hannah Whitaker, National Geographic

The silky, sturdy yet flexible material turned out to be a perfect

substitute for expensive and brittle boar bristles. In 1938, a
company called Dr. West’s started packing the heads of their “Dr.
West’s Miracle-Tuft Toothbrush” with nylon threads. The synthetic
material, it said, was “100 percent waterproof…with greater
cleansing and longer life” than the old natural-bristle brushes. Dr.
West's rolled out the new design nationwide, selling them for 50
cents apiece, about $8 in today’s dollars.

Since then, new types of plastic replaced celluloid in the handle,

and bristle designs became more complicated, but the basic
plastic-packed design has proved as durable as the material itself.

A plastic-free future?

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“It’s quite remarkable, actually, that the design [of the toothbrush]
has stayed so similar throughout the years,” says Charlotte Fiell, a
design historian from the U.K. “Basically, the function hasn’t
changed, has it?”

But now designers are beginning to ask: Can we remake this

essential object using little or no plastic?

The American Dental Association suggests that everyone replace

their toothbrushes every three or four months. At that rate, brushers
in the U.S. alone would go through over one billion toothbrushes
each year. And if everyone around the world followed those
recommendations, about 23 billion toothbrushes would get trashed
annually. Most are traditional toothbrushes, but some 55 million
U.S. brushers use electric toothbrushes each year, so some
number of those plastic-handled, battery-containing objects also
end up in the waste stream each year.

Many toothbrushes are unrecyclable because the composite

plastics most are now made of are difficult, if not impossible, to
break apart efficiently.

In response, some companies have pivoted back to natural

material, like wood or boar bristles. Bamboo handles can solve part
of the problem, but most of the bamboo brushes on the market still
have nylon bristles, so at least that part of the brush has to be
thrown away.

Other toothbrushes, like the Radius, pack more, sturdier bristles

into their heads. That helps them last longer so they need to be
replaced less often—only two brushes a year instead of four.

Some companies have gone back to a design that was originally

introduced nearly a century ago: toothbrushes with removable

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heads. Goodwell, in Portland, Oregon, produces metal handles it

hopes brushers will keep for years. The head pops out when the
bristles wear down, and a new one snaps in, reducing the total
amount of waste to less than 30 percent of a normal brush, says
Patrick Triato, one of the company’s founders.

It’s very hard to find plastic-free brush options. Biodegradable or

bio-based plastics aren’t always better for the planet than their
more traditional plastic counterparts, either because they don’t
actually break down particularly well or because they have
complicated environmental footprints in their own right.

But any option that reduces the total amount of material used and
packaging is a step in the right direction. Getting people thinking
about the tools they use to clean their teeth? That’s a big step too.

This article is part of National Geographic's new series, "The Story

of Plastic." Every other Friday, we will tell the story of how many
common plastic objects came to dominate our everyday lives—and
look at how we might break our plastic habit.

National Geographic is committed to reducing plastics pollution.

Learn more about our non-profit activities at natgeo.org/plastics.
This story is part of Planet or Plastic?—our multiyear effort to raise
awareness about the global plastic waste crisis. Learn what you
can do to reduce your own single-use plastics, and take your
pledge.

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