5 Ways our practice is ‘Going Green.’
We’ve all seen what plastic is doing to our planet. Programmes like David Attenborough’s ‘Blue Planet’ are making us wake up to the impact that the single use plastic culture is having. This in turn, is making us want to change our habits and switch to reusable products and disposing of our waste responsibly.
In the UK alone, approximately 263 million toothbrushes were thrown away in 2018. Many of these products are not recyclable with local authorities. We feel like we need to help our clients to have the ability to do more to work towards a more sustainable planet.
Colgate have teamed up with ‘Terracycle’ to create collection points for your used oral hygiene products. Ingeniously, they can recycle them to make children’s playgrounds and reusable bags. The proceeds at our practice go towards our registered charity, Parkinson’s UK.
Our practice wants to help our patients in making sure that we can lower our impact on the planet. Let’s look at 5 ways in which we’ve achieved this: -
We’ve opened a collection point to collect and recycle many of your oral hygiene products. This includes: - manual and electric toothbrushes, interdental brushes, tooth brush packaging, tooth paste tubes and cartons. Colgate has teamed up with ‘Terracycle’ to provide our practice with a recycle collection point. Simply save your product waste and drop it off at the recycle point at our reception each time you see us.
Switching to biodegradable oral hygiene products. You will all have heard your dentist and hygienist talk to you about which brushes to use, then you have the inevitable decision to buy what always seems to be yet another plastic brush that you will throw away. Now you don’t have to…we’ve begun to stock bamboo interdental brushes by ‘Picksters.’ You will also find a toothbrush from ‘TePe’ which is made from sugar cane and castor oil.
Using less single use items in the surgery. Martin’s surgery has recently been refurbished. When he designed this, he requested set ups which allowed him to have reusable items which can be cleaned and sterilised, before being reused. This is not always easy in health care where we are conscious of ensuring that we maintain highest standards of cleanliness, however there are some items where we can cut down on waste.
Going paperless. When you come to see us for your check-up, you will likely have noticed that you are given a ‘tablet’ to complete your medical forms. Not only are we able to cut down on additional paper records, but electronic records are much easier to access and keep organised.
Recycling our own waste. At the end of each week, Vicky, will collect the boxes from our deliveries and take these to be recycled. If we all do our bit then we can collectively have a real impact on working towards a sustainable dental practice.
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