Sustainable Toothbrush
Sustainable Toothbrush -
An electric toothbrush head redesigned with sustainability at the forefront.
The purpose of this college project was to select a popular consumer electronic and analyse it for the opportunity to redesign a more sustainable version.
I was given an electric toothbrush as my consumer electronic product to redesign.
I began this project by researching and analysing an electric toothbrush currently out there on the market. I disassembled the toothbrush and knolled it to understand its inner workings and how complicated it is.
The main things from this disassembly was:
A lot of non recyclable materials
The replaceable and ‘disposable’ toothbrush heads go straight to landfill.
It cannot be easily disassembled due to waterproof feature.
My focus for this project was on the ‘disposable’ toothbrush heads of an electrical toothbrush.
I aimed to redesign it so that it could be disassembled so that the materials could be separated better to be recycled rather than 100% to landfill.
Ultimately my solution came to be that the bristle section of the toothbrush head is fully recyclable and disassembled from the neck of the toothbrush head.
The bristles being from recycled nylon and the over mold being made from HDPE making it highly recyclable.
The difference this solution would make is the reduction in the amount of times that the non recyclable materials of the toothbrush head are thrown away instead of straight to landfill.
