Toothbrush dilemma

Recently, I was asked to contribute to an article for The Savvy Retiree on ways for retirees to save money at home with small, eco-friendly changes. This is right in my ecofrugal wheelhouse, so I was happy to provide input. I answered the first question, about products for the kitchen, by recommending rags to replace paper towels and a water filter to eliminate the need for bottled water, with some rough estimates for cost savings with each one. And in answer to a question about products for the bathroom, I planned to recommend my trusty Fuchs Ecotek toothbrush with the replaceable head, which both Brian and I have been using for years now. I have always considered this toothbrush a model of ecofrugal design because it allows you to replace only the part that actually wears out, the bristles, rather than forcing you to discard a handle that's still perfectly good as well. And it also saves you money because the replacement heads cost less than most new toothbrushes — although, since they're hard to find in stores, you often have to buy online and pay shipping costs.

Since I wanted to give readers good information about cost savings, I figured I should check the current price of Ecotek replacement heads online, including shipping, and compare that to the average cost of a new toothbrush. And there I ran into a problem. When I went to the site where we most recently purchased Ecotek toothbrush heads, iHerb, it appeared they were no longer available. I tried searching other sites, including Amazon, and still came up blank. And when I went to the manufacturer's website and clicked "buy now," it took me to a page with a description of the toothbrush but nothing actually available for sale. I was eventually forced to the conclusion that this old standby of my ecofrugal life simply wasn't available anymore.

This left me with two problems. The first, figuring out what to put in the Savvy Retiree article, was fairly simple; I simply recommended my cleaning hack with the combination of vinegar and dish soap in a scrubbing wand. But the second was a much bigger dilemma: Where was I going find a new toothbrush?

Fortunately, this wasn't an imminent need. In recent years, I'd taken to buying my Ecotek replacement heads in bulk to save on shipping, so I currently have five replacement heads squirreled away. And since I just replaced the head on my toothbrush this week, those should hold us for around nine months. But once those are gone, our long-serving toothbrush handles will become useless, and we'll both need new toothbrushes. So what would be the most ecofrugal model to replace them?

My first thought was to go looking for another toothbrush similar to the Ecotek, with a reusable handle and replaceable heads. And at first, I thought I'd found it in the Eco-Dent TerrAdenT, which has a snap-out head much like the Ecotek's. The manufacturer claims, "With TerrAdenT you save the handle and only need to purchase replacement heads in convenient multi-head packs" — exactly what I was looking for. But there was a problem: when I looked for these "convenient multi-head packs" online, I couldn't find them anywhere. Eco-Dent sold refills for the child-sized version of the TerrAdenT, but the adult-sized toothbrushes came only in packages with one full toothbrush and a single replacement head. So instead of being able to keep the same handle indefinitely — as the manufacturer claimed, and as I'd done for years with my Ecotek — I could replace the head exactly once with these tootbrushes before being forced to discard the whole thing and start over. The TerrAdenT, in short, would cut my toothbrush waste (including packaging waste) by less than half. And at $7 (not including shipping) for each toothbrush-plus-extra-head combo, they weren't even any cheaper than regular toothbrushes from the drugstore.

Eventually, I was able to track down one toothbrush with the same ecofrugal design as my old one: the Snap toothbrush from Greener Step. Available only from the manufacturer, it would cost us $19.95 for a "value pack" of two handles and 12 toothbrush heads. Add in $3.50 for flat-rate shipping, and it would come to roughly $2 per toothbrush — more than we'd been paying for the Ecotek, but it's less than the price of most toothbrushes sold in stores. After that, replacement heads in six-packs would cost $9.95 each, so if we bought two six-packs at a time we could keep the price steady. And the packaging, Greener Step assures, is "100% recyclable" — though that could just mean it's made from some kind of plastic that can theoretically be recycled, but isn't actually accepted by any program in our state.

The Snap toothbrush handles have a curvier shape that wouldn't fit our old toothbrush holder, but we've got a household hack to fix that problem. The bigger problem is availability. With these toothbrushes available only online and from the manufacturer, we'd be entirely dependent on this one source for our replacement toothbrushes. If Greener Step went belly-up at any point — an all-too-plausible scenario — we'd be back to square one.

Still, this would clearly look like the best possible option if not for one thing. While stumbling around the Internet in search of lower-waste toothbrushes, I happened across a whole slew of toothbrushes online with handles made from sustainable, biodegradable bamboo. And these supposedly eco-friendly toothbrushes are much cheaper than the Snap or even the Ecotek — as little as 60 cents each when you buy them in bulk. They generally get good ratings from users. They're easy to find online, so even if one brand were to become unavailable, there would still be plenty of others. The packaging they come in is generally recyclable. And the handles would actually fit in our toothbrush holders.

Of course, these bamboo toothbrushes have their problems, too. For one thing, although many of them proudly claim to be "100% biodegradable," it's really only the handles that are; their bristles are made of nylon, just like any other toothbrush's. (There's one company, Brush With Bamboo, that has bristles made from a castor-bean-based bioplastic, but they're still not biodegradable, and the brushes cost a whopping $5 each, plus shipping.) So you'd have to remove the bristles somehow — pull them out with pliers? saw off the head? — before tossing the handle in the compost bin, and even that wouldn't exactly break down quickly. Every time we throw sticks more than a few millimeters in diameter into our bin, we find them largely unchanged the next time we go to turn the compost. But we could always burn them in our outdoor fire pit (which we'll definitely be firing up this summer to dispose of all the brush we've produced by taking down that big hedge out front).

When you come right down to it, though, reducing waste isn't the real point — with toothbrushes or anything else we use. The waste our household produces is simply a handy stand-in for the resources it uses. By reducing waste, what we're really trying to do is reduce the amount of resources that go into the stuff we buy. So the real question here is, which type of toothbrush is more resource-hungry? One made entirely from plastic, but with only a small portion of that plastic discarded regularly? Or one that's made mostly from bamboo, a plant that grows fast and absorbs plenty of carbon, but is mostly grown in and shipped from China — and that still contains a small amount of plastic? How do you even compare the two? And is it reasonable to consider the price differences between them as part of this equation, or is the difference between $1 and $2 per toothbrush (a difference of only $8 per year for both of us) really too small to be an issue?

I'll admit, I don't have a good answer to that question yet. But I've got nine months to figure it out.