Plastic-free, you and me.
It is estimated that each person in the US throws away at least four plastic toothpaste tubes each year. The math is simple: with over 300 million people, that’s more than a billion toothpaste tubes going into the landfill annually.
And that’s just in the US, which has only 4% of the world’s population.
But it’s not just the toothpaste tube.
The deodorant stick, the liquid soap dispenser, the shampoo bottle, the plastic tubes of shave cream and moisturizer. They all get tossed from people’s bathrooms every two or three months and hang around forever as well.
Scientists believe that most plastic takes around 400 years to biodegrade.
That’s a long time. An estimated 92% of all the plastic ever made still exists, much of it in landfills, discarded after a single use.
Even worse, we see a lot of it washing up on our beaches.
Let's say that each of us throws out half a dozen pieces of plastic from our bathroom every few months.
Call it 25 items a year.
Imagine that all 260 million adults in the US are doing that - that's 6.5 billion pieces of plastic going into the trash just from bathrooms, just in the US, just in one year.
Now imagine if we all stopped doing that. Let's give it a try and see.