Tag Archives: replaceable

The replaceable heads of this minimal toothbrush are made from recycled thermoplastic!

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Clip is a new toothbrush concept made from recycled polypropylene with replaceable heads for when bristles fray.

There always comes the day when toothbrush bristles fray. If you use a standard manual toothbrush, then frayed bristles mean the whole toothbrush needs to be replaced. If you use an electric toothbrush, then the old toothbrush head can be traded in for a new, clean one.

Whichever toothbrush you prefer, replacing frayed bristles comes at a price. It’s costly, wasteful, and inconvenient. That’s why Edo Kim and Yeseul Kim, designers based out of London, designed Clip, a minimal toothbrush with a replaceable head.

Citing the high number of materials used to create conventional toothbrushes, Edo and Yeseul made sure to design Clip so that far fewer materials are needed for manufacturing. Made from recycled polypropylene, Clip takes on the traditional shape of manual toothbrushes.

Clip’s hollow unibody also remains intact over time and use due to polypropylene’s highly durable, long-lasting makeup. Compared to manual toothbrushes on the market, Edo and Yeseul decided to use far less plastic and nylon, replacing both materials with the recycled thermoplastic.

In doing so, the demand for energy used to manufacture plastic toothbrushes is lessened and less pollution is created as a result. When the bristles on Clip fray, users can swap out heads simply by popping out the old one and clicking the new head into place with a push-button locking mechanism. Since Clip’s unibody handle is made from such durable material, the actual toothbrush will last a long time and when the bristles on Clip’s head begin to fray, a new head can easily replace it.

Designers: Edo Kim and Yeseul Kim

Besides white, Clip would come in pastel shades of yellow, pink, green, and blue.

These TWS Earphones are solving the tech waste crisis with removable replaceable batteries

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Watch any AirPods teardown video and there’s one thing you’ll quickly notice. There’s no way you can put it back together once you’ve disassembled it. The damned things are hermetically sealed shut, and opening them means damaging them. In fact, Apple doesn’t even fix AirPods that come to them for servicing. The design is so notoriously un-fixable that it’s actually cheaper for Apple to replace them with a new pair.

Now that problem isn’t unique to Apple. Almost every single TWS earphone faces the same issue. Designed to be small, these earphones have absolutely tiny batteries that don’t last beyond a year, and their small bodies/components are almost always fused/glued together with no intention of ever being separated for repair or even recycling. The result is an overwhelming wave of tiny electronics that can’t be reused and can’t be disassembled and disposed of safely. They’re made of metal and plastic, which won’t biodegrade, and even contain toxic lithium-ion batteries within them.

To overcome this problem, the NOVO TWS earphones have a unique and clever compromise. Microphones, speaker drivers, and SOCs (system on chips) are usually designed to last 4-5 years, whereas those batteries go dead within a year or 18 months. The NOVO earbuds just turn the batteries into a modular unit that can easily be replaced… a feature you’d see in old mobile phones before they began becoming sealed, unibody devices. Unlike phones, however, these battery modules are designed to sit on the outside, and come in a variety of colors with ornamental patterns, adding a fashionable flair to the earphones. Every few years when the batteries wear out, you can simply switch the modules for new ones, choosing from a variety of colors and textures to ‘upgrade’ your earbuds. The old batteries get swapped in at the company which provides a discount on the new batteries, closing the loop and creating a circular economy where batteries are recycled and perfectly capable tech doesn’t enter a landfill because one single part was designed to go prematurely obsolete.

Designer: Batu Sozen

The Everloop toothbrush’s creative design lets you replace its bamboo bristles

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Every single plastic toothbrush ever made still exists today in some form or another, either in a landfill or the ocean. That’s a pretty scary statistic, considering there are roughly over 7 billion people on this planet today, and the average person throws out their old toothbrush every 3-4 months. That roughly translates to 20-30 billion toothbrushes being trashed each year, which isn’t a small problem to say the least.

The Everloop Toothbrush from NOS tackles this problem head-on by using a recycled plastic handle and disposable bamboo bristles. Taking on a unique cradle-to-cradle approach, the brush comes with a plastic handle that is, in fact, made from recycled toothbrushes. At the very end is a clamping mechanism that allows you to attach 100% natural bamboo bristles to the toothbrush’s head. The idea is to retain the plastic handle and periodically replace the bamboo bristles every few months. The bamboo bristles have absolutely no plastic in them, allowing them to easily be disposed of, or composted in a way that doesn’t harm the environment.

This fundamentally different approach is what sets the Everloop apart. Most toothbrushes (even the eco-friendly bamboo ones) use synthetic Nylon bristles that eventually end up becoming plastic waste when disposed of. Everloop switches the consensus by assigning the right material to the right part of the brush based on whether it’s retained or disposed of. It uses a robust, plastic handle (which you hold onto for as long as you need), and all-natural bamboo bristles (which you periodically dispose of, so that no plastic ever enters the waste cycle). Moreover, the fact that the handle is made from recycled toothbrushes means with each Everloop, plastic waste is taken out of the environment. Pretty cool, isn’t it?? And the packaging comes from thermoformed paper pulp too, another eco-friendly disposable material!

Designer: NOS