The toothpaste tube is the last plastic in the bathroom

Toothpaste tubes are famously unrecyclable — a plastic-aluminium laminate that no municipal system will take. Roughly 1.5 billion end up in US landfill every year.

Tablet formats have existed for a decade but were dismissed as a niche wellness format. That is changing as the underlying formulation improves — the current generation actually foams, tastes like toothpaste, and delivers competitive fluoride or n-Ha dosing.

Colgate and Unilever are both understood to have tablet SKUs in test market. Once one of them commits, the category flips within a single planogram cycle.