Toothpaste tablets are marketed as a plastic-free, more portable oral care solution – James Shackell bites down in search of a better brush While enterprises like TerraCycle offer collection-points for oral care products, plenty still end up in landfill. Moreover, many toothpastes – roughly half according to Dutch NGO Plastic Soup Foundation’s Beat the Microbead campaign – also contain microplastics, tiny indestructible plastic polymers that get spat down the sink and washed into the food chain.