Crest 3D White Toothpaste: Whiter Teeth with Worrying Waste

What a waste of cardboard.

I’ve blogged before about wasteful packaging of toothpastes (you can find the post here). I’ve decided to blog about it again, because it seems like toothpaste companies are not changing their packaging of toothpaste.

My favourite toothpaste is Crest 3D White. I am not a fan of the packaging though. Not only is the box that houses the toothpaste unnecessary in my opinion (why couldn’t just a safety seal be used on the tube?), it is also larger than is needed, and very highly coloured and shiny, indicating that a lot of resources go into producing it. This is a ridiculous waste. Who is going to reuse a toothpaste box? It’s going straight into the recycling box (and this doesn’t make sense because reducing is better than recycling which is a waste of resources if the item is not even needed or used), unless the purchaser doesn’t even recycle, in which case it will be going to the landfill creating even more garbage.

This box is shiny and highly coloured. It's definitely wasteful.

So much wasted space in this box. What a waste of cardboard.

This box is too big for the tube of toothpaste and in any event completely unnecessary.

I try to buy the largest size of toothpaste that I can, so that I reduce the number of boxes that come out of my toothpaste use (smaller toothpastes seem to have even more overlarge boxes, perhaps because companies think that they can trick us into thinking the tubes of toothpaste are larger than they actually are), but really, I would just prefer it if they abandoned their box system all together. I have seen lipsticks and other cosmetics and skin care items that come with no box and only a safety seal. Why can’t we do this for toothpastes and reduce the waste and impact on the world that we make when we brush our teeth?