Toothbrushes

I'm not going to forget this image in a hurry, toothbrushes washed up on the beach. I can't believe I hadn't even thought about toothbrushes being plastic waste before, and had been merrily regularly replacing my plastic stick with another and another. What are the options?

There are more and more options for eco-friendly toothbrushes cropping up on the accessible market. We started with some FETE Bamboo Toothbrushes having seen them on Facebook, they come cardboard packaging and a few colours so all good. Only in medium rigidity but everyone finds them comfy enough. It doesn't take long for the wood to discolour though and the kids got freaked out by the blackness forming on the wood around the bristles. The bristles also keep falling out or coming loose so a regular snipping is needed to maintain them at the same length. There are now loads of bamboo toothbrush products on Amazon which we haven't tried, and would definitely be worth giving a go.

Now we're on to corn-starch toothbrushes bought from Ocado (Natural Bio Family Toothbrush) made from non-GMO corn-starch and nylong bristles. OK we're realised the bristles are plastic oh dear, and the handles seem just like plastic, it's hard to believe that they're not. But apparently if you put them in your compost they'll decompose in about a year. Sounds good, and we all really love the toothbrushes, I much prefer them to my previous plastic brushes, somehow they are more gentle and friendly. Ocado only sells them in black, grey and white though, no-one in the family has batted an eye about that though, maybe colours are over-rated. They're a tad more expensive (£7.99 for 2) than the bamboo ones ((£12.99 for 4), and as usual the bog-standard plastic product is cheapest of all. Can we afford to go non-plastic? We must, we'll just have to use and buy less.

"The wooden ones get a bit moldy and yucky after a while. I prefer the corn-starch ones are they are always the same. I didn't like my electric plastic one as it was too noisy for bedtime. The old plastic normal one was ok, but the corn starch one is a smoother." Sophie, aged 8.