A DIY travel toothbrush holder

Back when my purse was stolen in 2018, one of the things I lost was a little travel toothbrush. It isn't often that I need to clean my teeth while out and about, but it has certainly come in handy at least a couple of times — when crashing at a friend's house, for instance, or after eating something sticky that I really want to remove right away. Fortunately, the toothbrush I'd lost came as part of a set of two, so I simply took its mate from the overnight bag where it had been living and transferred it to my new purse. Then I took one of the free toothbrushes I'd received from the dentist (which we don't normally use, since we prefer the kind with replaceable heads, but have saved a few of to accommodate unexpected overnight guests) and put it in the overnight bag to replace the travel one.

This worked out fine, except for one problem: a toothbrush isn't the easiest thing to store in a toiletry kit. Brian has a long plastic container (like these) that he keeps his in, but it's a bit bulky, and anyway, it seems to be so I thought maybe I could get away with just keeping mine in the plastic-and-cardboard packaging it came in, held closed with a rubber band. And that worked okay for a while, but over a year or so of use, the cardboard slowly started to disintegrate. By the time we took it on our recent trip to Indiana, it had become so soggy that I had to tear off the bottom part of the cardboard, and it seemed clear that the top part would soon follow. So if I wanted to keep my toothbrush clean and non-grubby, I was going to need a better solution pretty soon.

The simplest approach, of course, would have been to simply use the travel toothbrush I already had in my purse while on vacation. But since I'd already started using the non-travel one, I thought I'd prefer to continue using it while it still had some life in it. What I really wanted was one of those little snap-on plastic things that covers just the head of the toothbrush to protect it (like these), taking up less room than a case that holds the entire toothbrush. There were some of these at the local drugstore, but they cost more than I expected, and they all came in packages of three or four, when I only needed one. Buying three unnecessary plastic objects in order to get the one I wanted seemed pretty pointless and anti-ecofrugal, so we came home without buying anything.

Back at my in-laws' house, I started rooting through my toiletry bag, looking for something else — a plastic bag, a container, something — that could do the job I wanted done. My eye lit on my little travel-size container of dental floss (another freebie from the dentist), and I thought, hmm... this is about the same size as one of those snap-on toothbrush covers, and removing the little metal piece that dispenses the floss would probably leave a space big enough for the handle. Could it work?

The answer turned out to be yes — with a little modification. Once I used up the last of the floss, I pried open the container and found that there were two parts I'd have to remove: a set of little plastic prongs that held the floss spool, and a plastic lip that the metal dispenser was attached to. But the prongs turned out to snap off easily, and Brian was able to score the other plastic bit with a utility knife and snap it off as well. This left an empty shell that, as I predicted, was easily able to accommodate my toothbrush.

As ecofrugal accomplishments go, this wasn't a huge one. It only saved us a few bucks, and it wasn't something I absolutely needed in the first place, since I could have just tossed the big toothbrush and made do with the travel one. But as an illustration of the ecofrugal philosophy, "Waste not, want not," it's hard to beat. Rather than simply buying the thing I wanted (along with three things I didn't want, which would just create waste), I found a way to make it out of something that had cost me nothing, and that would have just ended up in the landfill itself. It's exactly the kind of small victory that makes up the ecofrugal life — and thus, I thought, an ideal project to share with you all as a start to 2020. Here's to a year of many more scraps salvaged, dollars saved, and precious ounces shaved off the old carbon footprint.