Environment

There is a huge amount of waste in the dental and medical field, plastic disposables, single use items, barriers, gloves…the list goes on and on. When you start really looking at it, its actually very shocking.

To ensure we are recycling everything we can we have contacted out suppliers for information on how to recycle their products and liaise with our local council to ensure things are going in the correct bins in the correct way. This often involves separating different materials from individual items. Time consuming but crucial and ultimately satisfying!

We use terracycle to upcycle our gloves (a big wasteful, non recyclable by product in our industry). We collect and send all our gloves to Terracycle who convert them into a product that can be used to manufacture other products.

We are a collection site for used oral care products, namely, toothpaste tubes and caps, manual toothbrushes, electric toothbrush heads, toothbrush and toothpaste tube outer packaging, floss containers. Simply make sure they are empty and drop them into us. We forward them to terracycle whom in conjunction with Colgate, convert the waste into a useable form to make new recycled products
We are a paperless practice.

We use technology to improve patient outcomes, make treatment better and more comfortable but also to lessen our negative impact on the environment.

All our equipment is brand new benefitting from the latest advancements in manufacture and technology, making it more efficient, quieter and cheaper to run.

We use intra oral scanners to take digital impressions of your mouth and teeth, avoiding disposable trays, adhesives, impression materials, and casting stone. These materials result in waste and can be challenging to dispose of, resulting in pollution. As we email the results to the lab we do not use bubble wrap, packaging and couriers to send models.
Our milling machine allows us to fabricate beautiful porcelain restorations on site thereby reducing transportation costs associated with shipping materials and reducing the carbon footprint.

As well as soft tissue surgery we use lasers to disinfect and sterilise during periodontic, endodontic and some surgical procedures. This reduces our use of chemicals in these situations.

We have an air filtration unit that filters the air in the surgery 12 times and hour and removes toxic aerosol spray from the air during amalgam removal procedures.

We have a hydrocyclone on our suction unit to retain amalgam suctioned during removal procedures.An intra-oral scanner and a milling machine in your dental practice is beneficial to the environment by reducing waste, decreasing the use of resources, and reducing transportation costs which add to better sustainable dental practice.

We teamed up with Micka and his amazing team at Spacebuilt to create the practice. As well as being a registered builder Micka also has a degree in environmental science. Marrying the 2 together he has ensured his projects and builds are undertaken with the environment, health and safety at the core .

Sustainable Practice in Architecture Construction and Engineering.
By teaming up with Spacebuilt, you have highly skilled, conscientious, environmentally minded tradespeople using low or no voc, locally sourced, sustainable materials on your project.

I want the environment I create for my patients and staff to be safe, healthy, ethical, inviting and relaxing. Working with such like minded people, the building site was a positive, fun place to be, and the outcome surpassed our expectations. Micka and his team are an absolute pleasure to work with, completely professional, considerate, passionate and do an outstanding job. I look forward to working with them in the future.

With the help of Dan Harper from Cool planet we have assessed our carbon footprint, and taken measures to reduce our waste and further improve our recycling. Dan gathers information from your business, identifies areas you can reduce your footprint and offers methods to offset the remainder. Dan has also been helping us with our recycling, finding out which tricky items we can and can’t recycle and ensuring we are keeping our waste to a minimum. Its an amazing service often overlooked by small businesses.

Being carbon neutral means that a businesses carbon footprint has been counter balanced with an equal reduction of carbon emissions elsewhere. This is an excellent way to address the contribution to global warming in the daily running of a business in which some emissions are unavoidable. For O’Meara Dental to become carbon neutral, its business emissions, once reduced, must be offset with purchased carbon credits.

Coolplanet only buys credits from independently verified and internationally recognised standards of carbon abatement projects. This years projects being supported by O’Meara Dental are:

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Yarra Yarra reforestation
The Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor is a native reforestation project located in Southwest Australia – a global biodiversity hotspot. The project is established on degraded, semi-arid agricultural land that no longer supports viable farming practices. It removes carbon from the atmosphere and recreates a healthy and functioning landscape, restored after decades of habitat loss and soil degradation.

Planting native tree and shrub species indigenous to the region provides essential habitat and connectivity for birds and animals to transition through the landscape. The project also delivers measurable environmental, social, economic and heritage benefits to the community, including local Indigenous inclusion and employment and support of over 80 local businesses. The reforestation is protected for 100 years by Carbon Right and Carbon Covenants registered on land titles.
(Previously named “Auscarbon Biodiversity Project”)
Project information: https://registry.goldstandard.org/projects/details/524
To offset O’Meara Dental’s GHG emissions, Coolplanet is purchasing and retiring Reforestation Gold Standard Credits.