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Sustainable dentistry

The current status of sustainability in the dental profession

British Dental Journal volume 234, pages 242–243 (2023)Cite this article

Key points

  • Environmental sustainability in oral healthcare is an important emerging subject that is inextricably linked to our activities as oral healthcare professionals.

  • There is an increasing awareness of the need to work together with other stakeholder groups across our profession to achieve meaningful impactful outcomes.

  • Research and knowledge exchange are key to the promotion and attainment of long-lasting environmental sustainability goals.

'We are waging a war on nature. This is suicidal…making peace with nature is the defining task of the twenty-first century. It must be the top, top priority for everyone, everywhere'. That was a blunt and urgent call to arms from the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, in his The State of the Planet Address (December 2020).1 Two years later, little has changed and the situation is even more desperate. Most of the British public is worried (or very worried) about climate change,2 but because the immediacy of its consequences is not as tangible as our current economic crisis for example, this is way down our priority 'action' list. There is a prevailing attitude in our profession that healthcare justifies all environmental impacts, and as a consequence, we have managed to compartmentalise sustainability out of our professional sphere of practice. This attitude is further compounded by a dissociation between our environmental behaviours as private citizens (for example, home recycling and renewable energy for home and transport) and our apparent inability to translate these behaviours into our dental practice settings. Encouraging signs of attitude and behaviour reversal by the 'worried' dental professionals around the world are emerging.

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Fig. 1

References

  1. United Nations. The Secretary-General of the United Nations Address at Columbia University: The State of the Planet. 2020. Available at https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/2020/12/sgspeech-the-state-of-planet.pdf (accessed December 2022).

  2. Office for National Statistics. Worries about Climate Change, Great Britain: September to October 2022. 2022. Available at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/worriesaboutclimatechangegreatbritain/septembertooctober2022 (accessed December 2022).

  3. Martin N, Mulligan S, Shellard I J, Hatton P V. Consensus on Environmentally Sustainable Oral Healthcare: A Joint Stakeholder Statement. 2022. Available at https://universitypress.whiterose.ac.uk/site/books/m/10.22599/OralHealth/ (accessed December 2022).

  4. Martin N, Mulligan S. Environmental Sustainability Through Good-Quality Oral Healthcare. Int Dent J 2022; 72: 26-30.

  5. Duane B, Dixon J, Ambibola G et al. Embedding environmental sustainability within the modern dental curriculum - Exploring current practice and developing a shared understanding. Eur J Dent Educ 2021; 25: 541-549.

  6. Field J, Martin N, Duane B et al. Embedding environmental sustainability within oral health professional curricula-Recommendations for teaching and assessment of learning outcomes. Eur J Dent Educ 2022; DOI: 10.1111/eje.12852.

  7. Planetary Health Report Card. Available at https://phreportcard.org/ (accessed December 2022).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Clinical Professor in Restorative Dentistry, University of Sheffield; Honorary Consultant, Charles Clifford Dental Hospital, Sheffield; Chair, World Dental Federation (FDI) Task Team for Sustainable Dentistry, United Kingdom

    Nicolas Martin

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  1. Nicolas Martin
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Correspondence to Nicolas Martin.

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Martin, N. The current status of sustainability in the dental profession. Br Dent J 234, 242–243 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41415-023-5568-4

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