I'll be honest: I don’t hate plastic.
It's one of the most remarkable materials humans have ever made. It's light, strong, waterproof, cheap, and you can shape it into almost anything. Medical tubing. Bike helmets. Parts that keep planes in the air. If you set out to invent a material for building things that last, plastic is a good contender.
Which is exactly why what we do with it drives me a little crazy.
We take this durable, versatile stuff and use it for things meant to last a few minutes. A coffee lid. A produce bag. A toothbrush you'll toss in three months. We've built an entire economy around turning a material that lasts centuries into garbage on day one. That's not a plastic problem. It's a design problem.
The recycling story
For decades, we were told not to worry because it would all get recycled. Rinse it, sort it, put it in the blue bin, done.
The industry knew that wasn't true. A 2020 investigation by NPR and PBS Frontline uncovered internal documents showing plastics insiders doubted, as far back as the 1970s, that recycling plastic would ever make economic sense. Recycled plastic is expensive to collect and sort, it degrades each time it's reprocessed, and new plastic made from oil and gas is almost always cheaper.
They promoted recycling anyway. Ad campaigns, the chasing-arrows symbol stamped on nearly everything, the whole feel-good routine. It kept us buying and kept regulators off their backs. Today, less than 10% of all the plastic ever made has been recycled.
So if you've ever stood over an overflowing recycling bin wondering if you're doing it wrong, know this: you were set up. The system was never built to work.
Whose job is it?
The responsibility belongs with the companies making this stuff. If you design a product, you should be accountable for where it ends up. That means making things that last, things that can be refilled or repaired, and taking back what you sell instead of leaving it for cities (and oceans) to deal with.
That's the thinking behind Nada. Around 23 billion toothbrushes get thrown out every year. Most are a solid plastic handle attached to a few bristles that wear out. Nobody needed a new handle. They needed new bristles.
So our handle is aluminum, and you keep it. When it's eventually done, aluminum can be recycled again and again without losing quality. The brush heads you replace come back to us and get commercially recycled into new products. Altogether, it uses 80% less plastic than a disposable toothbrush.
Where you come in
You didn't create this problem, and it's not on you to fix it alone. But you do get a vote every time you buy something. Choosing products built to last, and backing companies that take responsibility for their waste, puts the pressure where it belongs.
Plastic isn't the villain. Throwing it away is. Let's start treating it like the valuable material it is.
Keep the handle. Lose the waste. One aluminum handle for life, replaceable brush heads. Same clean feeling, 80% less plastic. Shop Nada → trynada.com
