Is Your Office Part of Dentistry's Green Future

Ina Pockrass - noemail@dentalmanagers.com — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

As managers of some of the country’s best performing dental offices, we know you are perennially on the look-out for ways to make your practice even better. In this series of articles, we at the Eco-Dentistry Association (EDA) share with you the opportunities presented by practicing in a more earth-friendly way. These opportunities include making the most of the technology and people in which your office has already invested, attracting and retaining the high-quality patients that value environmental stewardship and wellness, as well as understanding the techniques, tips and products that are hallmarks of green practice. Finally, we share the bottom line benefits that authentically green practices enjoy, something we know is sure to get the attention of your doctors.

Understanding Dental Office Waste

But before we move to solutions, here is the skinny on the problem. Unbeknownst to most people working in dentistry, our practices unnecessarily burden our already overburdened planet.

Have you ever taken a look at the volume of garbage thrown out each night in your practice? Single-use disposables may seem cheaper, but are actually more expensive both in real terms and in terms of the mountains of waste they create. The average dental office with one doctor and two hygienists generates between 2 and 3 large garbage bags each clinical day; the green dental office only has to deal with one small kitchen-sized garbage bag. Doctors might want to hold onto old-tech systems and methods, modalities burden the practice with risks associated with proper handling and disposal of toxic and hazardous materials, and they communicate to patients that your doctor’s work is outdated, even if he or she makes beautiful crown preps. Most dentists don’t appreciate that they remain personally liable for toxic waste from “cradle to grave.”

While 50% of U.S. dental offices self- identify as “mercury-free”, the EPA tells us that dental offices remain the number one contributor of mercury to our local waste-water treatment facilities, dumping 3.7 tons of this material each year. Many of these treatment facilities are ill-equipped to manage our toxic mercury waste, and the sludge from these facilities can end up in agricultural fertilizer, compromising our food supply. The National Institutes of Health tells us that mercury in its elemental form is a potent neurotoxin, especially hazardous to the developing brains of children. So whether your office is still placing amalgams or only removing them, every office should have an amalgam separator that captures this material before it leaves your dental office.

Infection control methods, while critical to protecting patients and practitioners, send 1.7 Billion sterilization pouches into landfills and 680 million chair barriers, disposable lab coats, and patient bibs, each year. And conventional x-ray systems, still used by almost 60% of dental offices, result in the disposal of 4.8 million lead foils and 28 million liters of toxic x-ray fixer a year. And that doesn’t include the paper we use for charts, faxes and insurance filings, almost 20,000 sheets a year in an office still using paper charts and paper scheduling and billing.

It doesn’t have to be this way. By embracing abundant high technology and good old common sense, we can be part of dentistry’s clean, green and highly profitable future.

Understanding Water and Energy Usage

Conservation is a critical part of dentistry’s green future. It is the mantra of green dentistry because it extends the life of our precious resources and keeps more money in the bank accounts of our practices. Many energy-saving modalities don’t require the office to purchase anything; all you have to do is stop wasting the energy for which your office pays but doesn’t use.

The next time you are ready to leave the office, scan each operatory and business area and look for those ubiquitous blinking lights emanating from electrical equipment. Chances are there are computers, intraoral cameras, televisions, and lights left on when no one is in the office. By assigning a team member to ensure that these items are turned off every time the office is closed, you’ll reduce the office’s “phantom load,” the energy drawn by an item that is plugged into the grid, but not in use. When you take these steps, prepare to be amazed at the reduction in your office’s electric bills!

An exciting development in dentistry’s green future is the introduction of energy- and water saving dental equipment. Take LED operatory lights, which reduce electrical energy consumption by 70 percent, eliminate the need for expensive halogen bulb replacements, and allow for easier placement of composite restorations by eliminating the premature curing of resins.

Several manufacturers have engineered waterless vacuum systems, which save between 350-500 gallons of water per day, per dental office—enough to fill 3 average-sized swimming pools in a year. If every U.S. dental office installed a waterless vacuum system, we would collectively conserve as many as nine billion gallons of clean, drinkable water a year—water we are now literally pouring down the drain. Stop and think about how we take water for granted, how dependent modern dentistry is on reliable access to clean water, and how one out of every six people on the planet already lives without safe drinking water.

Tapping Into a Wellness Model of Practice

Every branch of medicine is moving from a disease-based model to a wellness-based model—one that is centered upon prevention, early detection, and less invasive treatments. Sounds like music to the ears of high-performing dental offices, because it is. Dentistry’s green future embraces this wellness-based model because our profession is literally on the front lines of total body wellness. The evidence is unequivocal that a healthy mouth is the cornerstone of a healthy person.

Dental offices that eschew the old ways of “drill, fill and bill” are successfully reaching the burgeoning market of wellness lifestyle dental consumers. This well-studied universe of 25 to 33 percent of Americans, are values-based consumers that use an environmental and wellness-based litmus test to guide their purchases. In 2010, these consumers, the vast majority of whom are women, spent nearly $300 billion on goods and services that matched their values. Tap into this market and you’ll tap into people who become evangelists for your practice, reducing external marketing costs and bringing high-quality patients more willingly and frequently into the practice you manage.

Saving Green

Several years ago, the EDA retained a respected consulting firm, Natural Logic, to analyze green dental innovations and determine whether each costs or saves money, and the rate of return on investment.

The data showed that by incorporating green initiatives, offices can improve their bottom line by as much as $50,000 a year.

Energy-efficient overhead office lighting saves the average dental practice more than $600 a year on energy expenses, while steam sterilizers save more than $800 a year, from both energy and chemical purchase savings. Switching to cloth infection control and sterilization methods with effective surface disinfection can save as much as $2300 annually.While digital imaging has a significant up-front cost, once installed, it saves almost $9,000 a year, with the practice realizing return on investment in just six months. Tooth-colored restorations increase practice revenues by as much as $37,000 a year, because these more technique-sensitive materials command a higher billing rate.

What’s Coming

The next articles in our series will dive deeper into the products and tips you can incorporate to make your practice as Earth-friendly as possible, and will focus on the modalities to use to cost-effectively reach and retain wellness lifestyle patients. We’ll also share the particulars of the EDA’s GreenDOC™ program, the dental industry’s only green certification program that analyzes everything from the built environment to daily administration and marketing to dental processes and materials. The GreenDOC™ Certification Program provides a road map for implementing over 180 green initiatives and allows you to achieve Bronze, Silver or Gold Certification, based upon a points system.

There is no better time than today to start conserving precious resources and reducing your environmental impact. The planet, your patients and your bottom line will thank you.

10-Aug-12 8:00 PM

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Is Your Office Part of Dentistry's Green Future