If you think about it, dental floss is a fairly significant use of natural resources. If you use between twelve and eighteen inches of floss when you floss your teeth every day, then in one year, you will use between one hundred-twenty-two and one hundred-eighty-three yards of floss. If the current global population is 7.09521798037 billion, this works out to a total of between 54,647,512.2225467 and 81,971,268.3338201 miles of floss per year. And if you take into account the fact that dental floss was invented in 1815,1 this means that a total global total of as much 7,151,829,424.3 miles of dental floss may have been used in the history of the world.
And what, you may well ask, has happened to this more than seven billion miles of dental floss? Has it been used to build a space elevator?2 Have dentists developed a way to recycle dental floss?3 Have aliens used these lengths of dental floss to infiltrate terrestrial garbage dumps preparatory to executing their plan for global conquest? No! None of these ambitious projects have been put into effect. All of this floss, all seven billion miles of it, is lying around, just waiting to tangle up things like the axles of your car.
Well, we now have an alternative. Ultimate Technology Corp. has just introduced a completely reusable, 6-16 stainless steel dental floss. Buy it once, and you’ll never have to buy dental floss again.
The Flying News was sent a sample package, and we tested it out. While it does scrape a bit of enamel off your teeth whenever you use it, we found it kind of enjoyable to use, as it makes interesting scraping sounds. So we encourage you to go to your local dental floss supplier and demand the newest flossing technology. And if you ever take the wheels off your car and find the axles all wrapped up with dental floss, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.
Photo: “Teeth,” by DavidShankbone. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
- M Sanoudos and AG Christen, “Levi Spear Parmly: The Apostle of Dental Hygiene” Journal of the History of Dentistry 47(1999): 3–6. ↩
- http://www.niac.usra.edu/studies/521Edwards.html. ↩
- http://www.outofdebtagain.com/2013/04/how-to-recycle-dental-floss-tutorial/ ↩
Before this came out, I tried music wire, and I found guitar strings are a little easier than piano strings. Violin strings are better for musical effects, but guitar strings are cheaper. I found they last between 12 and 13 uses before they start to rust, though. Also, it makes the floss my dental hygienist uses feel like a feather in comparison, so I really enjoy my dental checkups now. Anyway, now that I know the stainless steel ones are available, I’m definitely going to buy a pack for the whole family.
So where do I get this?!
The only way we’ve found so far is to wait for Ultimate Technology Corp. to send you a sample. Otherwise, if you have a steel mill, you could try making it yourself. Hope this helps!