How much plastic does the Refillable Floss Pick save?

It can feel a little abstract to say that one of our core values at quip is to continuously improve, making our products, ourselves and the environment better. But, it’s true. To put it simply — we’re not ever satisfied with the status quo of oral care, or even our own business practices. That’s why we wanted to share data that feels real: Just how much plastic waste every quip brusher/flosser/swisher is saving with our products, the impact of our improvements on packaging, and the work we still need to do.

Refillable Floss Pick

Since launching the Refillable Floss Pick in September, we’ve already prevented *tens of millions* of single-use plastic picks from entering landfills. Each quip flosser personally saves up to 720 single-use plastic picks from entering landfills, and when we add up the amount of single-use plastic savings for all quip flossers, it weighs as much as ~200 African elephants. Fun fact: African elephants are the largest land animal, and their two tusks (which are actually teeth!) weigh 100 pounds alone.

Mouthwash

We launched Mint Anticavity Mouthwash just 3 months ago, with an easy-to-use, reusable dispenser that you can use over and over again. The mouthwash itself is 4x more concentrated than the leading mouthwash brands, so quip swishers are using 3x less refill bottles. But, while the refill bottles are 100 percent recyclable, we also designed them to use significantly less plastic per bottle. When you take into account that a quip swisher needs less bottles and the bottles use much less plastic, each quip swisher uses 10x less plastic than the leading brand. If you add all of that reduction in plastic together with every other quip swisher, it weighs as much as 220 shipping containers (like the ones on top of the ship that was stuck in the Suez Canal).

Switching to paper Brush Head refill tubes

Our design team was able to create new paper tube packaging for brush head refills that seals just as well as the old plastic tube — and is durable enough for shipping worldwide. While it might not seem like a lot, saving four single-use plastic tubes per quip brusher from entering landfills every year, it really adds up. Together, with every other quip brusher, the switch from plastic to paper tube packaging for brush head refills is reducing plastic waste equal to the weight of nearly 100 narwhal whales.

Switching to paper shipping packaging

Last year, we began transitioning most quip refill orders from plastic and foil bags to 100 percent flat paper packaging. Not only does this switch reduce plastic waste — equal to the weight of more than 45 Tesla Model 3s every year — but it also reduces shipping emissions. The flat paper packaging ships at a smaller size and weight, which means less resources to ship refills directly to you for refreshing your brush head on a dentist-recommended schedule.

The future...

We’re far from finished, and there is always more work to do to continue making your oral care routine (and our business practices to help you with that routine) more sustainable. In the next year, we’re committing to continue on more packaging improvements, in addition to working with our suppliers to ensure that raw materials for our products are being sourced more sustainably, through Earth Day 2022 and beyond.