TikToker shares money-saving travel toothpaste hack: ‘No need to buy new ones’

This story was written by Rachel McGlasson and originally appeared on The Cool Down.

Extra socks? Check. Swimsuit? Check. Toothpaste…?

We always forget something when traveling, and all too often, that something is toothpaste. And now, @swaygroup has a simple hack to help you save money and get more use out of these usually one-and-done tubes. 

The scoop

The video shows someone taking an empty travel-sized tube of toothpaste and holding it nozzle-to-nozzle with a full-sized tube. With a simple squeeze from the large tube, the travel-sized one refills. 

“No need to buy new ones!” the caption reads. 

How it’s helping

It’s no secret that travel-sized toothpaste is expensive. For example, a four-pack of Crest Protective Toothpaste costs $0.59 per ounce. The same toothpaste packaged in travel-sized, 0.82-ounce containers will cost you $1.18 per ounce! That’s double the cost per ounce just for the packaging.

This simple trick saves you extra cash on your vacation and helps turn single-use plastic into a more sustainable container. 

An estimated 1.5 billion toothpaste tubes end up in landfills each year. Made with a combination of plastics and a thin layer of aluminum, conventional toothpaste tubes are almost impossible to recycle. And that’s not considering the sticky residue left inside empty tubes.

But this is starting to change. In 2019, Colgate launched a recyclable high-density polyethylene (HDPE) toothpaste tube. And other brands are quickly following suit. Proctor & Gamble, which makes the Crest, Oral-B, and Blend-a-med toothpaste brands, is aiming for all its product tubes to be fully recyclable by 2025. 

But with many brands still in transition, simply refilling your travel tubes is an easy way to cut back on your plastic consumption. One of the most effective ways to reduce waste is to avoid it in the first place. By reusing materials, we reduce the amount of that product that needs to be made, reducing the environmental impact of creating goods. 

What everyone’s saying

Commenters and viewers seemed to react positively to the hack.

In a similar thread, Reddit user u/Remarkable_Wasabi_85 shared the hack in the r/backpacking forum. 

There, one user shared how to make an adapter to make the process easier, saying, “If you’re handy with a razor blade/knife and super glue, you can cut [two] old caps and super glue them together to make a tube-like adapter to hold them together, so you minimize the chance of waste/mess.”

Another user shared a travel tube designed for refilling, which he said he’s used for years.

This story was written by Rachel McGlasson and originally appeared on The Cool Down.