Perhaps you fear that making your own toothpaste will be complicated or that using it will cause you to lose your teeth. Perhaps you fear that it won’t taste good or that you’ll miss conventional toothpaste’s racing stripes.

I hear you because I was very hesitant to go this route. But in the interest of this challenge, I took the plunge and made my very first batch.

It is definitely lower waste, but let me tell you that I’m not convinced yet. I think some tweaking will be in order. First, it isn’t very pleasant tasting and I’m not loving scooping out the toothpaste with a butter knife to put it on my toothbrush.

The Recipe Section

Check out the menus. This blog has a recipe section where I put all my successful recipes in one, easy to access place.

One Year Later

Tubes of toothpaste are wasteful. It’s mostly a packaging issue as the tubes are not recyclable in most districts. Because of this, I was motivated to keep searching out an answer for my family.

For an interesting look at recycling toothpaste tubes: check out what Earth911.com has to say.

My first adjustment was to put my concoction into a silicone GoToob to eliminate the annoying distribution problem. This was runny in the summer and hard in the winter due to my climate’s effect on the coconut oil in my recipe. I think if I find a recipe I like for toothpaste, the GoToob is a fantastic idea.

Another issue was the taste. I didn’t think I could sell my husband on it without adding xylitol, but I don’t tolerate xylitol well and other sugars just seemed counter-productive to be rubbing on your teeth.

By the way, my kids use a more conventional kid’s toothpaste because it is “safe to swallow” and they like the taste. Right now, I’m choosing to let this slide, despite the tube it comes in.

We settled for a tooth powder put out by ECO-Dent, which comes in a container we can recycle. My husband and I are both happy with it and they do make a kids’ one we can try down the road (it isn’t described as “safe to swallow” so they need to learn to spit first). This isn’t perfect, as we ship it in (with a lot of ingredients and products we can’t get in our area) and recycling isn’t as great an answer as people make it out to be, but it’s better than contributing to landfill waste.

How About You? 

Have you ever tried a DIY recipe that just failed? Humorously? Horribly? Was it toothpaste? Do you have a toothpaste recipe you love? Let me know in the comments.

Until next time, keep that talk walking!