Save over TWO DOLLARS per year with an eco-friendly dental floss trick for the environmentally-conscious. Dental floss manufacturers hate it!

The issue:

Dental floss has a serious problem with unnecessary waste: each length of dental floss has a “dead zone” at the ends that is used to wrap around fingers.

This unused region is thrown away without ever having been actually used as dental floss (Figure 1).

***Fig. 1:*** *Only the middle part of a length of dental floss (highlighted in green) is actually used; the ends are wasted.*

Proposal:

Instead of wrapping the dental floss around your fingers in order to hold it, it would be ideal if you could just grip the floss directly. This would avoid the wasted end regions, but, unfortunately, human hands are not optimized for this use case.

Fortunately, there is a tool that is perfect for this application: locking pliers (A.K.A. Vise-Grips™).

Instead of wrapping floss around your fingers, just hold the floss directly with two pairs of locking pliers, one in each hand, as shown in Figure 2.

***Fig. 2:*** Note how much more of the floss can be actually used (usable region highlighted in green), as compared to the situation in Figure 1. The locking pliers remove the need for the wasted “end loops” of dental floss.

Conclusion:

In 2019, $6 will buy you 120 meters (4724 inches) of dental floss, which translates to 1/8th of a cent per inch. So if you save six inches of dental floss per day, that’s (600 cents / (4724 inches / 6)) = 0.76 cents per day of savings.

PROS: Saves 6+ inches of dental floss per day, or ¾¢ per day! Over the course of a year, this saves a grand total of $2.78 in 2019 dollars, which could buy you two small coffees at a fast-food establishment.

CONS: A person who uses these will probably inadvertently chip a tooth or knock one out completely with these pliers. Maybe they should be plastic instead of metal.