The Million-Dollar Toothpaste Tube
Unsung Science
CBS News
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
We’re overrun with plastic. It’s in our oceans, our water, our food. Something has to be done—preferably by corporations, which churn out millions of tons of plastic every year.
Enter: the toothpaste tube. It might seem like a minor player in the plastic problem, but we throw 20 billion toothpaste tubes into the landfill every year. Recycling plants can’t take them, because they’re made of plastic and metal foil bonded together. They all end up in the landfill.
Colgate, the #1 toothpaste brand, decided to tackle the problem. It spent five years and millions of dollars to design a tube made of the same plastic milk jugs are made of—the easiest-to-recycle plastic in the world—with no metal foil. The new tube is indistinguishable from existing tubes—except the whole thing can go into the recycle bin.
And then—Colgate gave away the patent. Today, 90% of the world’s toothpaste makers are switching to recyclable toothpaste tubes. This is the uplifting, surprising, and slightly hilarious story.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | After 65 years, we've pretty much mastered the art of making plastic. |
| 0:09.2 | What we haven't yet figured out is what to do with the plastic when we're done with |
| 0:13.6 | it. |
| 0:14.6 | It lasts a really long time. |
| 0:15.6 | It doesn't buy the grade, so it just sits there. |
| 0:19.0 | Of all the forms of plastic being dumped into our oceans and our landfills, you might |
| 0:23.2 | not think that toothpaste tubes are much to worry about. |
| 0:27.6 | But you'd be wrong. |
| 0:29.2 | So there are roughly 20 billion with a B toothpaste tubes produced every year, most |
| 0:34.6 | of them, or if not all of them wound up in landfill. |
| 0:38.2 | That's because you can't recycle toothpaste tubes, or at least you couldn't, until |
| 0:44.0 | Colgate spent five years and millions of dollars coming up with a recyclable tube, |
| 0:50.0 | and then did something highly irregular with the patent. |
| 0:53.9 | I'm David Pogue, and this is Unsung Science. |
| 0:59.6 | A few things are more devastating than a loved one that's gone missing. |
| 1:05.4 | From Wondry, the vanished is a podcast where host Marissa Jones tells stories of missing |
| 1:10.7 | persons that have gone overlooked. |
| 1:12.9 | Listen to the vanished podcast wherever you get your podcast, or you can listen ad-free |
| 1:17.3 | by joining Wondry Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. |
| 1:22.9 | Season 2, Episode 10, the multi-million dollar toothpaste tube. |
| 1:30.6 | Can you imagine, until the late 1950s, there was no such thing as plastic. |
| 1:37.3 | My parents lived in a world before plastic, maybe yours too. |
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