One less thing for the landfill

In my quest to eliminate the amount of waste I produce I have always been troubled by the toothbrush/toothpaste dilemma. I am not a person willing to forgo some clean teeth, well, at least not permanently. Should a person merely use the toothbrush longer than the three months recommended by the American Dentists Association in order to decrease the number of toothbrushes used over time? Well, I already do that (coupled with boiling water to kill germs) but it just doesn't seem like enough.

I like the sound and look of these toothbrushes. Unfortunately shipping them from Australia isn't exactly going to be helping my initial problem of waste.

http://environmentaltoothbrush.com.au/

So, I found and settled with this one. I don't actually need it yet so it will sit in my drawer for a while (sorry, no review). 2.99 isn't a bad price and finding it at target (less than a mile from my house) is a plus for convenience and transportation cost/impact. It's packaging doubles as a postage paid envelope to be sent back at the end of it's life for recycling. No landfill for this one!

http://www.preserveproducts.com/products/personalcare/toothbrush-mail-back-pack.html

Another Step in Recycling

I dread throwing the tops off of bottles and abhor throwing out whole empty plastic tubes like the one formerly filled with velocity face wash I just finally finished. So, my depressing empty tube of velocity spurred me into a frenzy of internet searches until I found these two websites:

AVEDA cap recycling
Origins tube recycling

So, sometime this week (possibly today if I make it) I will take a daring trip to that scary place some refer to as "The Mall"--bag of recycling in hand--and ask the ladies at the counter if they would be so kind to recycle an empty velocity bottle for me.