Tag Archives: dental floss

Waste of the Week #13: Single Use Floss

“Hi Performance” single use floss… wow!  How wasteful is this?  I don’t remember where I discovered this gem of an item, but it made me laugh hysterically.  With every use you save 10″ of floss while throwing away an amount of plastic equivalent to 25% of the standard packaging.

What happened to the usual floss, the little box with the spool containing up to 300 feet of the stuff?  Maybe this person was a dentist and took a pack home from work, but I doubt it.  I could imagine dentists using something like this if they don’t reuse their instruments for some reason.  Why would these be available at a convenience store?  I guess for…convenience.

Floss is usually made of nylon or teflon coated with wax…which means we’re all throwing away strands of plastic everyday and tangling up pipes.  Is there something other than plastic to use?

I found compostable single use floss picks…although it wasn’t clear if the floss itself was something other than plastic.  I’ve read of silk being used as a substitute, and as I expected this really annoys the animal rights people.  Apparently, Gandhi promoted the use of wild silk that didn’t involve killing the silkworms.

How about a compostable plastic (or paperboard?) standard box of non-plastic floss?  Anything but this single use stuff…making life easier is fine, but this is just one of those products that doesn’t need to be out there.  I took a walk after writing this, and of course I found a handful of them scattered on the sidewalk…perfect.