Fantastic news in support of environmentally sustainable dental care! Worldwide consumer oral hygiene product company Colgate have partnered up with TerraCycle to launch a new free programme in the UK for recycling oral care products and packaging, regardless of brand. Participants in the programme also get the opportunity to fundraise for schools and charities by collecting points each time they participate, which are redeemed for charitable donations.
The Colgate Oral Care Recycling Programme aims to divert oral care packaging and products from landfill. The program is accepting all brands of toothpaste tubes and caps, outer toothbrush packaging, toothpaste boxes, electric and battery toothbrush heads and toothbrushes. These mixes of materials are not currently recyclable through UK council recycling systems.
Products can be dropped off by the public at more than 1000 participating drop-off locations across the UK, or sent in privately using a freepost UPS label by creating a free account with the programme online. Once TerraCycle collects the materials from consumers, the recycling business separates products and packaging by polymer type, cleans them, and then extrudes them into plastic pellets to make new recycled products.
To find out more about the programme, or create an account to start recycling oral hygiene products, go to (and also share!) the link: https://www.terracycle.co.uk/en-GB/brigades/colgate#how-it-works
It would be wonderful to see dental care settings such dental hospitals, general practices and community dental settings joining the programme and becoming public-drop off locations and promoting it to their patients.
Delivering more sustainable packaging is also among the goals outlined in Colgate-Palmolive’s 2017 Corporate Social Responsbility and Sustainability report(Read it here: https://www.colgatepalmolive.com/content/dam/cp-sites/corporate/corporate/en_us/corp/locale-assets/pdf/Colgate_CorporateSocialResponsibility_SustainabilityReport_2017.pdf) The company’s strategy includes striving to design products for reuse, recyclability, and materials reduction as well as supporting efforts to improve local recycling systems. We will have to watch this space...
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