You toss your old toothbrush in the bin and forget about it. Out of sight, out of mind. But that little piece of plastic? It's just getting started on a very long journey — and it doesn't end well.
The average person replaces their toothbrush every three months. That's four toothbrushes a year, per person. Multiply that by the nearly eight billion people on the planet and you start to get a sense of the scale of the problem. Over a billion plastic toothbrushes are thrown away in North America alone each year.
So where do they all go?
The Recycling Bin Isn't the Answer
Here's something most people don't realize: plastic toothbrushes can't be recycled through your municipal program. It's not a matter of laziness or lack of infrastructure — it's chemistry.
Most conventional toothbrushes are made from a combination of materials: nylon bristles, rubber grips, and multiple types of plastic fused together in the handle. Because these materials are bonded at the manufacturing level, there's no practical way to separate them. Recycling facilities are designed to sort single-stream materials, and a toothbrush is anything but that.
So even if you rinse it off and toss it in the blue bin with the best intentions, it will almost certainly be sorted out and sent to the landfill anyway. The recycling symbol on a toothbrush doesn't mean what you think it means.
Landfills Are Just the Beginning
Most discarded toothbrushes do end up in landfills, where they'll sit for somewhere between 400 and 500 years before breaking down. Plastic doesn't biodegrade — it photodegrades, meaning it slowly breaks apart into smaller and smaller fragments called microplastics. Those microplastics leach into the soil and waterways, entering the food chain in ways we're only beginning to understand.
But landfills aren't the final destination for all of them.
They End Up in Our Oceans
A significant portion of plastic waste — including toothbrushes — makes its way into the ocean through runoff, wind, and improper waste management. And once plastic enters the ocean, it can travel extraordinary distances.
Researchers have found toothbrushes washing up on remote Hawaiian islands, some of the most isolated places on earth. These weren't littered locally. They were carried thousands of miles by ocean currents from somewhere else entirely. And it wasn't just researchers who discovered them.
Seabirds were feeding them to their chicks.
On Midway Atoll — a tiny stretch of land in the middle of the Pacific, more than 2,000 kilometres from the nearest continent — albatross parents have been observed bringing plastic debris back to their nests, mistaking it for food. Researchers have documented toothbrushes, bottle caps, and lighters inside the stomachs of chicks who never had a chance. The plastic fills their bellies, leaving no room for real nutrition, and they starve.
A toothbrush you used in your bathroom ends up on a remote island, in the stomach of a seabird chick who will never see a city or a landfill. That's the full arc of a disposable toothbrush. And it's heartbreaking.
Nada Saw the Problem — and Decided to Do Something About It
When Founder of Nada, Simon Cooper, looked at the problem with disposable toothbrushes, he couldn't unsee it. The oral care industry produces an enormous amount of plastic waste every year, and almost none of it is recoverable through conventional recycling. It felt like a design failure hiding in plain sight.
So he set out to build something different.
Nada toothbrushes are designed with end-of-life in mind from the very beginning. The handles are made from aluminum — durable, infinitely recyclable, and accepted in virtually every municipal recycling program in Canada. When your brush head needs replacing, you send it back to Nada, where it's 100% commercially recycled into other products. Nothing gets tossed. Nothing gets lost to a landfill or an ocean current.
It's a true closed-loop system: a handle built to last a lifetime, paired with a returns program that ensures every brush head is fully accounted for and responsibly processed.
No seabirds. No ocean drift. No 400-year wait in a landfill.
The toothbrush you brush with twice a day shouldn't be a problem you pass on to the planet. With Nada, it doesn't have to be.
Learn more at trynada.com
