10 picks · vetted plastic-free
The best plastic-free toothpaste
Tablets in glass, paste in a metal tube and powder in a jar. Each one keeps the laminated tube out of your bathroom bin, and one of them carries fluoride.
A standard toothpaste tube is a sandwich of plastic layers around a thin core of aluminum foil. Recyclers can't take that mix of plastic and metal apart, which is why Colgate spent five years engineering a tube they would accept.
You can skip the tube altogether. Tablets come in a glass jar and refill by mail, Davids packs its paste in a metal tube that goes in with the cans, and tooth powder sits in a jar that lasts a season. The American Dental Association only grants its seal for cavity protection to toothpastes that contain fluoride, so if that matters most to you, start with the Bite fluoride tablets.
Rinse and floss to match
Mouthwash comes as tablets too. You drop one in water or chew it, and both jars are glass. Silk floss wound into a glass dispenser replaces the nylon spool in its plastic case, and the refills arrive in compostable pouches.
Refillable Silk Dental Floss with Glass Container and Refills
And the brush
Bamboo handles compost once you pull the head, and the Suri electric brush has an aluminum body with plant-based heads that go back to Suri in the post.
Common questions
- Is there a toothpaste that doesn't come in plastic?
- Yes. Toothpaste tablets in a glass jar, paste in a metal tube and tooth powder in glass all skip the laminated plastic tube. Davids uses a metal tube with a plastic screw cap, which is the only plastic among the three picks on this page.
- Do toothpaste tablets work as well as paste?
- You chew a tablet and brush with a wet brush, and it foams the way paste does. What protects against cavities is fluoride. Bite sells a version with fluoride and one without, so pick the fluoride jar if that protection is what you want.
- Why can't toothpaste tubes be recycled?
- Most tubes are layers of plastic laminated around aluminum foil, and recyclers can't separate the two. Colgate later built a tube from layered HDPE that recyclers accept, though it is still plastic. A metal tube or a glass jar avoids the question.
- Is tooth powder safe to use every day?
- The Life Without Plastic powder is clay and baking soda with essential oils. It has no fluoride, so if you use it daily and want cavity protection, ask your dentist whether a fluoride rinse or tablet should sit alongside it.
- How do Davids metal tubes get recycled?
- Davids says to cut off both ends, slit the tube open along its length and rinse out the paste before it goes in the recycling. Rolling the clean metal into a ball with other foil helps the sorting machines catch it. The cap is HDPE plastic, which recycles separately.
Sources