Overview
This advice provides an overview of sustainability in your dental practice and how you can reduce your environmental impact while maintaining safe, high-quality care. It aims to support you to make proportionate, evidence informed, improvements to reduce your contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and build a culture that promotes education and awareness of sustainability across the dental team and with patients. It brings together information and resources from a wide variety of existing sources in one accessible place.
The carbon modelling within dentistry towards a sustainable future report estimates that the make-up of the carbon footprint of dental practices in the UK can be broken down into the following:
- Patient travel 31%
- Staff travel 30%
- Procurement 19%
- Energy related 15.3%
Our information and resources are a starting point for discussions and planning within your practice. You can then adopt the suggested actions to address the impact of climate change that are feasible in your setting.
We are also calling for national action to make dentistry more sustainable and reduce its environmental impact.
There are several main areas where dental practices can influence their impact on sustainability:
- Travel: patient and staff travel are typically the largest contributors to the dental carbon footprint in the UK
- Procurement and materials: clinical materials, equipment, and consumables (including those that are single use only) carry embedded emissions across their lifecycle
- Energy and waste: practice energy consumption (heating, ventilation, lighting, equipment) and the generation or segregation of clinical and non-clinical waste
- Clinical prevention and stewardship: prevention, effective long-term disease management, and antimicrobial stewardship all help to reduce avoidable activity, travel, and resource use.
Sustainability measures should never compromise infection prevention and control or clinical outcomes in your practice. Where choices exist, you should select the options that are effective, safe, and proportionate.
