It’s a hundred-dollar question that has raised several eyebrows when I went around asking it.
Dentists recommend changing your toothbrush every three months, but do you know that every time you throw away a used toothbrush, you are adding to the tons and tons of toothbrushes that end up at the landfills each year?
Just think if there are 40,000 people living in the CNMI, and everybody changes toothbrush every three months, that’s an equivalent of 120,000 toothbrushes thrown away every three months, or 480,000 toothbrushes a year. In five years, there will be 2.4 million used toothbrushes in the landfills high enough to create a huge mountain.
According to Michael Bloch, author of Green Living Tips.com, over 25,000 tons of used toothbrushes end up in landfill in America each year.
Toothbrushes with replaceable heads can help minimize the mountains of trash we are making each year. There are many toothbrush brands in the market that provide replacement heads to help you reduce your contribution to the “used-toothbrush mountain” in the landfills.
You can use recycled toothbrushes to:
• Scrub the area between the tiles
• Clean combs
• Clean dust that has caked into other items
• Paint art projects of your kids
• Clean a cheese grater
• Clean some jewelry with baking soda
• Remove stains from carpets and upholstery
• Apply hair dye or hair color
• Scrub the dirt off from fruits and vegetables that have hard skins
• Clean car battery terminals
• Clean dog or pet poop from your shoes or sandals
• Clean bike chains
• Clean the control knobs of the cooker
• Clean computer keyboards
• Clean dashboards of your car
• Clean fingernails and toenails
One important note —do not forget to disinfect your toothbrush before recycling it.
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