“And we need that foaminess to spread it around the oral cavity. The first trials were a fizzer-or more accurately, weren’t. He eventually found a lab on the Gold Coast that was willing to give it a go. But I was saying, ‘I want a vitamin tablet, but I want it to actually be a toothpaste’. Or if you wanted a vitamin tablet, it’s the same. If I’d wanted to just make a new brand of toothpaste, that was very easy. It’s a brand-new product over here so nobody could help if I said, ‘I want a toothpaste, but in a tablet form’. So just finding someone who was willing to take that on was so hard. “And the first challenge was that we’re small. “I was desperate to stay within Australia,” he says. There’s no point in developing an environmentally friendly product, then shipping it halfway around the world on carbon-spewing bulk transport. Got rid of the flat, got rid of the furniture, and it just so happened that my sponsorship was in Noosa.” So I think it was in June that I looked into a sponsorship in Australia, and then by October I’d moved here. “I was working up in Yorkshire and realised I had had enough of the cold dark winters. “I qualified as a dentist in 2007, and then I lived all over the UK,” he says. That dental school was in Leeds, in the UK. There was no communication between us-I just think people are becoming more environmentally conscious.” Ironically, it was a girl from the same dental school as me that just happened to do it. “And then in the UK, there’s a similar product that started around the same time as mine. “There’s one in New Zealand now called PopTabs, and one in America called Bite, and they’re probably really leading the way at the minute,” he says.
Most were available online but weren’t well-known.
Dr Wood had found they were produced in several countries already, including Germany. Toothpaste tablets seem like a simple, sustainable solution to this problem. And where corporations buy that water and sell it back to wealthy people in plastic bottles. And while suspending the active compounds in water was a great solution to that problem in a world where water was cheap and plentiful, we now live in a world where there isn’t enough clean fresh water for about a billion people. Trusting a patient to put the right amount of gel in a take-home whitening kit is hard enough. But they’re inadequate for containing dosages. He knew that before the end of the 19th century tooth powders were common. But you’ve got to cut the top off, cut down it, open it up, clean it out, recycle it, and in reality, who does that? I know toothpaste companies do their best. It’s just coming up with something that’s just quick and easy, and still recyclable, and reusable as well.” But you’ve got to cut the top off, cut down it, open it up, clean it out, recycle it, and in reality, who does that? We all live such a busy life now. “And look, I know toothpaste companies do their best. “I got so angry, because every hotel room had these little tubes of toothpaste in them,” he says. Not long after researching chewable toothpaste tablets with his patient, he was on holidays in Bali. It was the tubes that really bugged Rob Wood. And how many people actually recycle the tube the toothpaste comes in? But we’ve always assumed that those key ingredients need to be delivered in a paste-which is up to 40 per cent water-even though it’s meant to be absorbed in saliva. It does the job it’s meant to-delivering a payload of fluoride alongside an abrasive that dislodges food scraps and a surfactant to make it foam.
Toothpaste hasn’t really changed a lot in the last 140 years. All he had to do was find a formula and a local lab that could help him make such a product, and the problem would be solved.Įxcept nothing is ever that easy. “What we don’t want is someone who’s an environmentalist jeopardising their oral health because they’re looking for an environmentally sound product,” he says. Now he’s come out the other side with a chewable toothpaste tablet called ToothChews, which he hopes will fill a gap in the market with a product that is acceptable both from an environmental and oral health point of view. That discovery sent him down a three-year rabbit hole. While a cosmetics company produced tablets they marketed as chewable toothpaste, there was no fluoride in them. She said to me, ‘I really want to use chewable toothpaste tablets like you can buy overseas, but I can’t find any with fluoride in them in Australia’.” Together they booted up a computer, did a quick Google search, and realised she was right: “There’s nothing that’s matching dental needs to what she was after with the environmental side of things.” “A lovely lady, who used to be a diving instructor on one of the Pacific Islands. “It was actually a patient who asked me about it,” he explains.