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Oral care and sustainable living have a few things in common, but the big one is routine. They’re both about getting into good habits every single day. Making little choices that add up to big change.
“Prevention has always been better than cure, right? That’s true for dentistry and the environmental crisis,” says Dr.Joseph Badr, owner of award-winning sustainable oral care brand, Dsmile.“You’ve got to catch problems early, rather than waiting for things to get worse.”
Dsmile is sort of the tooth care equivalent of Single Use Ain’t Sexy. It’s a range of refillable, reusable, sustainable products – toothbrushes, mouthwash, floss –designed to cut down on the (frankly alarming) amount of single-use plastic that goes into maintaining our smile.
“Think about how many toothbrushes you use and throw away,” Dr. Badr says, “and the mouthwash bottles, the floss packets. Multiply that over a lifetime. And then there’s the clinics themselves: every time a patient comes in, everything basically gets covered in plastic.”
Dsmile isn’t Dr. Badr’s first venture. After getting his bachelor of dental science from Melbourne University in 2001, he first set out to change the dental industry. There was a lot that needed changing. “Twenty years ago, the barriers for patients were too high,” he says.“Expense, lack of control, the pain, the smell, the sterile clinics, everything.”
To shake things up, Dr. Badr founded D-Spa Dental, a chain of dental clinics that looked more like luxury health spas than scary laboratories. The idea was to make dentistry more accessible, maybe even fun, in the hope that people would actually want to book their next visit. The sustainability work came later.
“The health sector represents about 10 percent of the global economy, and the more we dug into it, the more we realised, dentistry in particular had some major issues” Dr. Badr says. “So now the challenge was: how can we be as sustainable as possible without compromising patient care?”
"I realised sustainability isn’t a destination, it’s a process. If we can reduce single-use plastic by 70 or 80 per cent, that’s a great start.”
The first step was acknowledging their limitations. Dr. Badr was a dentist, not an environmental scientist, so he hired a sustainability consultancy to audit D-Spa from top to bottom. Recycling bins were installed throughout the network. Patients were encouraged to drop off their used toothbrushes and tubes. Each clinic got a dedicated green ambassador from within the team; someone whose job it was to reduce waste across the business: renewable power, energy usage, single use plastic, the works.
Now all of D-Spa’s PPE waste gets sent straight to Terracycle instead of landfill – between March and September 2021 alone, that represented 450kg of plastic.
But Dr. Badr felt there was still room for improvement, so he set about building his own line of sustainable oral care products. These could be rolled out through clinic network, as well as direct to consumer online. Dsmile was the result.
“The important thing for us was just to make a start," says Dr. Badr. "I got to the stage where I was crippled with questions like, ‘Where are we going?’ or ‘What if we do the wrong thing?’ and people were like, just freaking launch! I realised sustainability isn’t a destination, it’s a process. If we can reduce single-use plastic by 70 or 80 per cent, that’s a great start.”
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. The plan was to have everything manufactured in Australia, both to support the local industry and shrink the overall carbon footprint. But finding the right products and suppliers was a challenge. The first batch of 3000 tooth brushes were made from corn starch, but the sustainability consultants failed to mention that corn starch warps when it heats up in transit.
“We were so excited to open that first shipment, and the brushes were all warped and useless,” Dr. Badr says. “Bamboo toothbrushes were out, too: we looked at them, but bamboo isn’t very clean or hygienic, and it actually requires a crazy amount of water to grow. With water being a scarce resource, that wasn’t going to work.”
Dsmile eventually settled on products that were made from recycled plastic and designed to be re-used over and over again. Dr. Badr says the floss canister should last around five years (patients just need to replace the inner reel). The toothbrush handle you can keep forever: you just need to swap out the brush heads. That little change alone means each brusher uses about 70 per cent less plastic.
What can’t be re-used can always be recycled: the products, the cardboard packaging. Even Dsmile deliveries are carried out by carbon-neutral couriers.
“Since we’ve launched, we’ve had so many dental clinics approach us, because their patients are asking for this stuff,”Dr. Badr says. “The public is driving this change, and if clinics don’t get onboard, eventually staff and patients will notice, and they’ll switch their loyalties.
“You should feel excited to reach out and pick up a toothbrush! The solutions are right there: businesses just need to take the initiative.”
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