I started stockpiling floss by accident. My dentist handed me four sample containers at one appointment, and instead of dumping them in a drawer, I threw one in my range bag. Two months later, I was six miles from the truck on a trail when a pack strap tore clean off at the stitching, and that little plastic box saved the whole trip – I sewed the strap back on with floss and a curved needle, and the repair held for two more seasons before I got around to fixing it properly.
That’s when I realized floss could be a survival item, and it earned its place in my stockpile.
The thing is, one container holds fifty to a hundred yards of braided nylon and costs about a dollar. Nylon doesn’t rot or mildew the way cotton thread does, so a container that’s been sitting in a bug-out bag for five years performs exactly like one straight off the shelf. Twenty-five reasons follow, counting down to the one that actually matters most.
25. You Can Stitch a Wound Shut
Braided floss shows up on every improvised suture list ever written, and mechanically it holds – it’s strong, and it ties a knot that won’t slip. The catch is the braid itself: the woven surface wicks bacteria straight down into the wound channel, so boil it first if there’s any way to.
But before you’d ever need to do this for real, go get some actual training. Take a first aid class if one’s within driving distance. If you can’t get to one, there are solid first aid videos online that walk through wound care step by step, and watching a few is better than nothing.
But neither one is with you at 2 a.m. when it’s just you and the injury and no instructor to ask. That’s why I also keep a first aid book in the kit. The one I bought is this medical survival guide, that covers what the class and the videos usually don’t: gunshot wounds, fractures, infections that get bad fast. Between the three, you’re not walking into it blind.
24. You Can Build a Tripwire Alarm
Run a length at ankle height across the approach to your property and tie the far end to a few cans loaded with pebbles. Floss is thin enough to disappear in low light, so whoever’s coming up that path gives you warning before they know you’re there. At a dollar a container, you can string an entire perimeter and still afford to replace the whole thing every time a deer wanders through it.
Of course, cans on a string will wake you up, but they won’t tell you where he is or which direction he’s moving. There’s a better version on page 52 of The Lost Skills of Independence – an easy and low-cost DIY tripwire alarm I built myself in a weekend. It’s worth doing if you’ve got a long driveway or a back fence line nobody watches.
23. You Can Make a Fishing Net
This one burns through your supply fast, but a hundred yards of floss knotted into mesh gives you a small dip net or gill net. Passive fishing keeps working while you sleep, cook, or fix the roof – something no amount of time spent holding a rod can match.
Also worth looking at other ways to build a fishing net, ideally one sturdier than anything dental floss will give you:
But before building any of these projects, check your state’s rules before using one outside an actual emergency; gill nets are restricted or banned in a lot of places for good reason.
22. You Can Remove a Stuck Ring
How many times has this happened to you? At least once, I’d bet. Hot weather, a banged-up knuckle, too much salt at dinner – the finger swells and that ring isn’t going anywhere.
Most of us try the same things. Vaseline, dish soap, cold water. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the finger keeps swelling and the ring becomes its own tourniquet.
I saw a video of somebody doing it with dental floss, tried it the next time it happened, and the ring came off in under a minute. That’s how this earned a spot on the list.
Here’s how it works:
- Wrap the floss tightly around the finger, starting just past the ring and working toward the fingertip
- Thread the loose end under the ring itself
- Unwind from that side, and the ring walks itself off over the compressed skin
21. You Can Build a Snare Trap
Braided floss makes a functional snare loop for rabbits and birds, and a single strand works as the release line on a figure-four trigger. Snaring is regulated or banned outright in most states outside a genuine emergency, so this stays in the practice-now category.
Set a few in your own backyard and learn the 4 essential knots while it’s still legal to get them wrong.
20. You Can Catch Panfish
Floss doesn’t have the abrasion resistance of real monofilament, so anything with size snaps it against a rock or a submerged branch on the first run.
Bluegill, perch, crappie, and small trout sit comfortably inside what it can handle, and those are the fish that actually put protein on a plate. Braided nylon floss tests out around five to ten pounds depending on thickness, which covers a lot of water.
19. You Can Tie Fishing Flies
The PTFE version, usually labeled shred-resistant, is a single monofilament strand instead of a braid. That makes it nearly invisible in water and useful for building leaders or lashing materials onto a hook shank. Keep a container of it separate from your braided stock – the two do different jobs entirely.
18. You Can Make an Emergency Lamp
Braid five or six strands together, coil most of the length in a jar of rendered fat, cooking oil, or old motor oil, and leave a quarter inch standing above the surface.
Light it and you’ve got hours of usable light from something that was headed for the trash. Trim the char every so often and the same lamp runs for weeks on a single pint of grease.
If you’ve never built a lamp before, here’s a step-by-step guide meant for beginners and experienced preppers alike.
17. You Can Start a Fire With Wet Tinder
Wax is fuel, so a small bundle of waxed floss catches a spark and holds a flame long enough to dry out whatever you feed it next. That’s the difference on the third rainy day, when your birch bark is soaked through and your paper’s gone to mush. Pull off a foot, ball it up loose, and light the edge.
16. You Can Use It for a Bow Drill
No single strand holds up to bow drill tension, but braid four or five together and double the whole thing back on itself, and you’ll get a few sets out of it before friction cuts through. A few sets is usually all you need — one coal lights a fire, and that fire lights the next one.
15. You Can Repair a Torn Pack Strap
Webbing, canvas, boot uppers, and tent walls almost always fail at the stitching long before the material itself gives out. Floss outlasts the thread that failed in the first place, so a repair with it tends to hold longer than the factory stitch did. Pack a big-eyed sailmaker’s or upholstery needle with the container – floss alone can’t get through heavy fabric without one.
14. You Can Fix a Loose Coat Button
Regular thread loses on a heavy work coat or canvas pants, since the button takes more stress than that thread was ever rated for. Sew it on with floss instead, and it usually outlives the garment.
13. You Can Make a Bootlace
A single strand snaps under lacing tension, but braid four together and it holds fine. Walking miles of rough ground with a boot flopping open is a reliable way to roll an ankle, and a rolled ankle out there turns a bad day into a rescue.
12. You Can Fix Loose Eyeglasses
Hinge screws back themselves out and vanish into carpet, always at the worst possible moment. Thread floss through the empty hinge barrel a few times, cinch it tight, knot it, and trim the tails — it holds for weeks, and it beats walking around with one lens taped to your temple.
11. You Can Stop a Rope From Fraying
Every cut end of rope or webbing starts unraveling the moment it’s cut, and once the fray works up past a few inches, that section is done. Wrap floss tightly around the cut, knot it off, and the unraveling stops right there. The same fix works on the raw edge of nylon strapping.
10. You Can Hold a Splint in Place
Medical tape won’t stick to wet or bloody skin, and it runs out fast in a real emergency. Braided floss holds a dressing in place and lashes splint sticks tight without adding bulk under the wrap. Just watch the tension, since floss is thin enough to cut into skin if you pull too hard.
9. You Can Use the Container as a Blade
That little metal cutting edge built into the container is a real tool on its own — it opens packaging, cuts cordage, trims moleskin, or slices tape when your knife is buried at the bottom of the pack. Pop it out of a spent container and you’ve got a flat, weightless blade for a wallet kit or an Altoids tin.
8. You Can Slice Soft Food
Cheese, cheesecake, fresh bread dough, and soft butter all tear and smear under a blade. Pulled taut, floss cuts straight through without dragging. Stick to unflavored – mint coating transfers straight into whatever you’re cutting.
7. You Can Truss a Roast or Bird
Nylon floss handles oven heat without melting, and it’s thin enough to bite in and stay put. Rolled roasts, stuffed birds, and anything else that wants to unroll while it cooks holds together with a few wraps.
6. You Can Hang Food Up to Dry
Braid a long length, work a series of loops into it, and hang the whole thing from a rafter for drying peppers, garlic, herbs, or onions. Air circulation is what keeps them from molding, so getting them up off a flat surface does most of the work for you.
5. You Can Fix a Torn Tarp
When a metal grommet rips out of a tarp corner in high wind, that tarp is finished unless you can build a new attachment point. Reinforce the torn area with floss stitching, whip a loop into it, and you’ll often end up with a tie-out stronger than the factory ring was. Braided floss also works as a guyline for light tarps and a clothesline in a pinch.
4. You Can Mark a Trail
Tie short lengths at eye height to mark a route back to camp, a water source, or a buried cache. Natural cordage rots away over a season, but nylon sits through snow and rain and still shows up in spring. Waxed white floss catches headlamp light from a surprising distance.
3. You Can Tie Off an Umbilical Cord
As strange as it sounds, an emergency can put you in a room where somebody is delivering a baby and help isn’t coming. If you don’t have a clamp in the kit, floss will do the job.
Two ties, then a cut between them:
- Tie the first knot roughly two inches from the baby’s body.
- Tie the second knot an inch further out.
- Cut between the two ties, never past them.
Boil the floss first if you have fire and water for it, and wash your hands before you touch anything.
2. You Can Trade It
If you’ve ever had a toothache, you already know why somebody would trade for this. That’s what makes floss work – nobody needs convincing.
Trade goods live or die on value per cubic inch, and floss sits in the same tier as salt and sewing needles. Twenty containers take up less room in a bin than a single roll of paracord, and you can buy all twenty for the price of one lunch.
Turns out floss isn’t the only thing in the house punching above its weight. Here are 17 more weird things that could save your life in a crisis, and most of them are already sitting in a drawer somewhere.
1. You Can Prevent a Deadly Infection
A tooth infection can bring you down faster than the crisis itself, and brushing alone won’t stop it. Bristles never reach into the gaps between your teeth, so food packs in there and bacteria build a sticky film on the tooth that no amount of rinsing washes off. That matters twice as much when you’re living on stored food and your body isn’t getting what it needs to fight an infection in the first place.
If you’re wondering why a toothpick won’t do, floss has a real advantage over one – a pick pokes at a single spot, while floss scrapes the whole side of each tooth and slips just under the gumline, which is exactly where that film does its damage. Leave it there a few days and it hardens into tartar, and at that point nothing you own can get it off.
One Thing Money Can’t Buy
So there’s no wonder dental floss has its place in your survival medical kit. 25 uses, every one of them doable, and any of them could matter on the wrong day.
But floss is just a tool. What decides the outcome is what you know and how you move in the first few minutes.
So before you fill your kit with gear, make sure you can do these:
You can’t put a price on knowing those. All of them are laid out plain and simple in Survival MD, written by a surgeon who learned medicine in post-communist Romanian hospitals with no electricity, no disinfectant, and no equipment. There aren’t many doctors alive who’ve practiced both ways.
That’s why so many preppers keep this one on the shelf. It teaches you how to diagnose a problem without a single piece of testing equipment, how to legally stockpile months of antibiotics and painkillers without refrigeration, how to treat infections, fractures, burns and stab wounds when nobody is coming, and which three things in your kitchen cabinet protect your teeth from exactly the infection described above.
Don’t have Survival MD yet? Now’s a good time. See a preview, then decide for yourself. I’m telling you, this one is a must-have.
You may also like:
Hoarding These Items Might Get You Arrested
Why You Should Never Hide Your Stockpile in the Basement (VIDEO)
How To Build Your Own Panic Room
Why You Should Have Iodine Pills in Your Stockpile Right Now
How To Make Your Own Salt For SHTF
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