Sustainable dentistry: at VITALI we believe in the ‘green’ development of the dental sector

Believing in sustainable dentistry is possible, but more importantly, necessary.

Indeed, we should bear in mind that the Earth is not ours.
We inhabit it for the duration of our lives and then leave it to our children and grandchildren. We should care about leaving it as we found it. Instead, we are leaving it more and more polluted and more and more crowded. Just these days, the world’s population has crossed the 8 billion threshold and, if we continue like this, greenhouse gas emissions may become unsustainable in a few decades.

There are so many things that need to be done to avoid climate change becoming irreparable. Governments, scientists, researchers and all public administrations, from the largest to the smallest, have to take care of them. But to be effective, the ecological transition must necessarily involve the lives of everyone: businesses and citizens, producers and consumers.

Dentistry, too, can and must be an active part of change, starting with manufacturing companies, which can:

• minimise their carbon footprint;
• adopt sustainable technology;
• design products with minimal environmental impact.

The VITALI headquarters, located in San Marino di Bentivoglio near Bologna, were built in 2009 based on our design.
The 3500 sq.m. facility was built with eco-sustainability criteria and is designed to ensure the highest environmental quality of the workplace (brightness, temperature, noise, etc.). In addition, Research & Development is a function that we apply to all our fields of activity: from process optimisation to improvements in the supply chain, from product design to the search for solutions to protect the well-being of operators and the sustainability of the healthcare sector.

The choice of suppliers has always been one of the most important factors in our quality policy.
We look for suppliers on the basis of specific characteristics. We select them paying specific attention to reliability. And then we test them with the same rigour with which we test all our units. Over time we have also tried to have local suppliers, very close to our headquarters, mainly for three reasons:

1. we want to make products that are completely made in Italy, which means high quality manufacturing;
2. we want to know our suppliers personally, to prompt them to share our product philosophy;
3. being close means reducing transport costs and times, which also and above all helps us reduce our carbon footprint.

VITALI dental units are built to last longer. Who benefits from this?

We benefit in terms of reliability and credibility.
Dentists benefit because they can replace their dental units less frequently, with lower maintenance costs and downtime reduced to what is strictly essential. The environment benefits because the low turnover of dental units in the practice that always chooses VITALI means less use of raw materials, less transport and a reduced carbon footprint.
This is why we believe that choosing a quality dental unit, manufactured in an environmentally friendly company, can be part of an eco-friendly dentistry concept.

And dental practices? Can they in turn contribute to making dentistry sustainable?

Yes, absolutely!

Every dental practice can in fact use eco-friendly materials and have an increasingly strict control over consumption and waste.
There are also many good practices that dental practices can adopt in favour of green dentistry, whilst maintaining high quality of care and safety levels. For example, choosing truly Italian-made suppliers whose production is certainly more eco-sustainable than that coming from thousands of kilometres away; investing in reusable products (such as stainless steel trays); doing away with paper and going digital (including signatures); recycling aluminium and making regular separate waste collection.

Change must be global.
With minimum choices, the first steps can be taken towards real sustainability in dentistry.