Sustainable oral healthcare and the environment: challenges

Oral health professionals are increasingly recognizing the need to provide care in a manner that is sustainable, by minimizing the impact on natural resources and at the same time promoting and delivering optimal oral health in a safe manner.1^,2 Health is intrinsically linked to the environment and therefore, to adhere to the Hippocratic oath of ‘first, doing no harm’, healthcare has an inherent responsibility to prevent negative environmental impacts. An environmental impact is defined as ‘any change to the environment, whether adverse or beneficial, wholly or partially resulting from an organization's activities, products, or services’.3 Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the environment with a resultant negative change, and can broadly encompass everything from air pollution, to carbon emissions to disposal of single-use plastics (SUPs). Consideration of the environmental impact of dentistry is intertwined with the concept of sustainability, which is defined as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'.2 Application of this concept to the dental industry can be simply transcribed as ensuring that the dental care we provide patients today does not negatively impact future patients. A major recent challenge to sustainability within dentistry is the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has had the unintended, but hugely concerning, consequence of generating enormous volumes of SUP waste.4 We should also be mindful of our personal and team behaviours and attitudes to environmental sustainability, both as private citizens and in the workplace, because there needs to be a ‘will’ for there to be a ‘way’ to deliver change.