Your Toothbrush's Carbon Footprint

On Saturday, I attended AIGA's Compostmodern conference in San Francisco. The conference was organized by the S.F. chapter of the AIGA and AIGA's Center for Sustainable Design. It's exciting that designers are talking about sustainability even though the concept of sustainability seems at odds, or downright antithetical, to a lot of graphic design. Afterall, don't designer's love itty bitty type surrounded by white space, glorious white space? Certainly, the AIGA has sent out its fair share of multiple page publications with florescent inks and vellum overlays. But, change is good and change is progressive and I do think that AIGA and designers are trying to change.

One of the speakers at Compostmodern was Valerie Casey, the founder of The Designer's Accord: "a call to arms for the creative community to reduce the environmental impact caused by design, and to work collaboratively to inspire sustainable change." Her talk was impassioned and quite inspiring, although, there were multiple mentions of purchasing carbon offsets, which seem like a big sustainability boondoggle to me. Can matter, once created, be eliminated, oh, I mean, offset? Wouldn't it be better to reduce business travel, given that we are living in an age of easy and inexpensive global communication.

Another thing that came up in Ms. Casey's talk was the design of the toothbrush and how horrified one of her coworkers at IDEO was to see his design wash up on the beach five years later almost perfectly preserved in its original sparkly plastic glory. Which got me to thinking: why can't industrial designers come up with a reasonably designed toothbrush? Toothbrushes are now so bloated and over-designed that older toothbrush holders (the kind with little holes in a closed container) cannot accommodate them. The design of such toothbrushes has long annoyed me given the ephemerality of this product. Isn't it just the bristles that need replacing every there months, anyways? Imagine the carbon footprint of our country's collective toothbrushes. Here's my call to arms to all you product designers out there: for the love of God, please re-design the toothbrush!! I, for one, would pay big bucks for a sustainable alternative to this: