Green Toothpaste Tubes and the New Antitrust Battleground
Companies are sharing information on how to make products recyclable. Critics say this is anticompetitive behavior.
Photo illustration: Rui Pu for Bloomberg
For decades there was no way to recycle empty toothpaste tubes. Every minute about 38,000 of them ended up as trash, dumped in landfills or incinerators around the world.
Then, around 12 years ago, executives at Colgate-Palmolive Co. set about trying to end that waste. Their challenge was that the tubes, a mix of aluminum and various plastics, were too complex to affordably recycle. So Colgate designed a simpler tube made from high-density polyethylene, commonly used to make milk bottles.