You Can’t Even Replace The Battery in the “Green” Suri Toothbrush

When the “sustainable” electric toothbrush company Suri first started getting buzz, we were hopeful. The electric toothbrush space has been full of disposable, unrepairable junk for a long time, and Suri promised to be different. Greener. More responsible. We read articles about its repairability, even.

But we’ve been disappointed.

Pro tip: If you’re going to base the entirety of your product marketing on that product being sustainable, then you’d better make sure that it’s repairable. Like, maybe the owner should be able to change the battery themselves?

“Every toothbrush you’ve ever owned still exists,” says the tagline on the homepage for the Suri “sonic toothbrush,” and that’s true. In a landfill, your plastic brush is going to sit and do nothing but exist, and perhaps slowly degrade over millennia. We should probably do something about that, but the answer is probably a low-tech toothbrush made of recyclable or recycled material. Or just use a twig. The answer is probably not an electric toothbrush with a motor, non-user replaceable battery, charger, and so on.

I bought a Suri toothbrush several months back, and I’ve been using it daily ever since. Truthfully, it’s an excellent electric toothbrush, one which does its job well, lasts a long time on a single charge, and (mostly) looks great while doing it. If it wasn’t for the possibly excessive green claims, it would be a solid choice. 

Good Suri

First, let’s be clear: Suri does a lot of things right. Last summer, I spoke to co-founder Gyve Safavi, who explained the whole setup to me. The barrel of the unit is made from aluminum, a great material not only for longevity, but also because aluminum can be nearly infinitely recycled—it doesn’t degrade with each cycle, so it can be reused over and over. The replaceable heads are fashioned from cornstarch, and the bristles are made with castor-bean oil. These will break down much better than petroleum-based plastic. 

The company even offers a collection scheme in some countries. Suri is U.K.-based, and you can buy replacement heads in the national Boots drugstore chain, and drop off the old ones for responsible recycling. In the US, you can send the used heads back with a prepaid shipping label. 

And as I mentioned above, the brush is pretty great. The heads last very well (I’m still on my first, which I clean regularly in the optional UV-sterilization case), and the handle and heads are small enough to make it very maneuverable. If you remove the head, it also fits very easily into a small wash bag for travel. The brush has two speeds, but Gyve told me that in testing the difference in cleaning efficacy between them was minimal, so you may as well stick with the slower mode and save battery. 

The only ding I would give it as a gadget is that the paint finish on the aluminum body has blistered and started to peel in one or two spots, even though I wipe it dry after use and store it on the included magnetic mirror bracket thingy. Not a big deal, but also not great for the price. 

However, what gets us are the green claims. Even the name, Suri, is a contraction of “sustainable rituals.”

Greenbrushing?

The materials are well-chosen, and the availability of spares in a national U.K. store is great. But the maker also claims that the toothbrush is “designed to be easily repaired.” That might be true, but not by you. For repair, you need to send the toothbrush back to base. And that includes replacing the battery.

On the plus side, the internals are quite modular, which should make repair fairly simple. But without repair guides, or the availability of spares, that means very little. 

I originally set up last year’s meeting with Gyve to discuss these problems. He explained that the toothbrush can actually be opened by the user, but as this would break the waterproofing, they don’t recommend it. He said that the company was planning on a version 2 soon, and promised to share details with me in a few weeks. That was last June. We also talked to Suri about stocking spares in the iFixit store. 

We have attempted to contact them since then and have received no reply. Perhaps the user-repairable design is harder than it seemed, or perhaps those plans have been ditched. Without an answer we cannot know. But we can know that a rechargeable device which cannot have its battery changed by the user is hardly a model of sustainability.

Another thing that bugs me is the mail-in recycling program. Is all that extra CO2 and packaging required for a return, plus processing, really better than just letting those plant-based heads rot and return to the Earth?

The real problem is that repairability, and environmental concerns in general are still a marketing feature, an option for the consumer to choose, just like color, features, and so on. Partly this is on us. Instead of using that old car into the ground, we buy a brand new electric model, which requires all those raw materials, pumps out CO2 from the manufacturing and shipping process, and still pollutes the city air thanks to the increased weight wearing tires and brakes much faster. Plus it’s probably still fossil fuels generating the electricity they run on. 

But mostly it’s on all the industries that don’t care about sustainability other than as another lever to pull to get people buying more and more stuff. And yes, it’s easy to go after companies that go part of the way and say they’re not doing enough. But it’s also easy to make green claims and not back them up. 

The folks at Suri seem to really be into making electric toothbrushes greener, but come on. Replaceable batteries are job one if you care about sustainable gadgets, and that’s why we’re sad about this missed opportunity.