Restore Our Earth🌍

As dentists, we are incredibly passionate about oral health. However, we refuse to ignore the negative impact the oral care industry is having on the environment. 

This year, we formed our first Sustainable Task Force, which is made up of different team members from across Spotlight Oral Care. We come together and examine ways that we can lower our impact within the company from packaging and recycling programmes to certifications and ways to support local environmental organisations. The work we do is exciting, innovative and helps towards our goal of creating a more earth-kind oral care industry. 

Speaking of positive changes, for this Earth Day, to tie in with this year’s theme, ‘Restore Our Earth’, we have put together 5 simple sustainable swaps that you can make in your daily life. It can be difficult and overwhelming when starting to reduce your impact, but these tips are affordable, achievable and will make a big impact in reducing your environmental footprint. 

Firstly, let’s talk candles! We all absolutely love to burn candles in the home, but it’s important to make sure that whatever candles you invest in are sustainable, made ethically and contain toxin free ingredients so that they don’t harm your health or the planet’s. Look for soy wax or non toxic candles and, of course, when they have burned fully, wash out and keep the remaining wax. You can keep that wax as a wax melt and reuse the empty containers, which work perfectly as plant pots or storage containers.

Speaking of plants, adding some greenery to your home or garden is a super-green way to clean the air and support biodiversity. Even if you don’t have green fingers, there are plenty of plants and flowers that are low maintenance and easy to keep alive. Look to succulents and cacti which require little watering or care but will spruce up your home and help the planet, too!

Next up let’s talk about making changes to your beauty routine. Beauty product swaps are great because, as items we use everyday, changing to sustainable alternatives means you’re really helping to lower your environmental impact. Of course one of the best ways to do that is to swap to our 100% recyclable toothpaste tubes. All of our Spotlight Oral Care Toothpastes are made using sugarcane which is a renewable resource. It's grown with fair labour in Brazil, and is 100% earth-kind and 100& recyclable. Once you finish with the toothpaste tube you can wash it out and pop it straight into the recycling bin. This is completely different to regular toothpaste tubes which are made from a combination of fossil fuels, plastic and aluminium so they can’t be recycled and end up in landfills, poisoning our earth and oceans. Our toothpaste tubes will never pollute the earth and, with our clean formulation, our toothpastes are great for your oral health too. If you make one swap this Earth Day, this is it. 

Continuing with our beauty swaps, armed with the knowledge that there are over 10 billion tonnes of plastic dumped in our oceans every year, we know we’ve got to do something to try and reduce this impact. Our toothpaste tubes go a long way in helping, but so does swapping out your shower loofah. Regular shower loofahs are made with plastic, and as those plastic fibres break down with use they wash down the drain, enter our water systems and, over time, pollute our marine life. Swap to a natural, organic loofah instead to stop microplastic pollution.

Many of you may not know that most generic, cheap chocolate is made with cocoa beans that are farmed in unsafe conditions using child labour. When you buy a sweet treat this earth day make sure it's organic, fair trade and that it supports workers with fair wages and safe working conditions and never uses children in its supply chains. If the chocolate you buy is extremely cheap, the reality is that somebody else is paying the price, whether it be humans or the planet. Examine the brands you invest in before you buy to make sure whatever you treat yourself to is eco-friendly, earth kind and good to people and the planet. 

We hope that you’ve really enjoyed all of our easy, earth-kind swaps this Earth Day. Please follow Spotlight Oral Care for sustainable updates!