Healthy Planet

We have always taken our role as an environmental steward seriously because a healthy planet is fundamental to our future. As a global leader in manufacturing dental products and technologies, we continuously seek to identify solutions to minimise the environmental impact of our operations and conserve resources.

As part of our commitment to expand our engagement with stakeholders around our sustainability strategy and gather tangible insights, in 2021, we conducted in-depth analysis to measure and evaluate the environmental impact of our business. As a result, we now have centralised global ESG metrics and an environmental baseline against which we can benchmark our progress. To build on these insights, we are currently creating a detailed sustainability executional roadmap to ensure we reach our flagship sustainability goals as well as set new targets that look beyond 2025. Find out more below.

We remain committed to creating sustainable working environments by ensuring our facilities and offices are energy efficient and implementing robust recycling and waste management practices. We have initiated audits at our sites that account for more than 90% of our total energy consumption and have already implemented several energy reduction improvement opportunities.

Additionally, in 2021 we advanced our industry leading partnership with the FDI World Dental Federation’s Sustainability in Dentistry initiative, which was created to define and promote sustainable practices within dentistry and mitigate the industry’s impact on climate change. We have published a Consensus Statement outlining the global environmental impacts of dentistry and ways of reducing these accessible to all industry players.

Last year we set out four ambitious Healthy Planet strategic priorities and targets. We are pleased that we have already met our Scope 1 and 2 emission intensity and water withdrawal intensity reduction goals, and we are encouraged by the solid progress we are making against our goals. We are in the process of finalising our sustainability executional roadmap and conducting a global energy, waste, and water use audit. This audit will inform new targets that look beyond 2025, and we will be able to share these soon. 

2021 is the second year we are reporting in alignment with the TCFD recommendations and the SASB standards. This is in line with our commitment to incorporate climate-related issues into our strategic and financial planning processes, and to report the positive progress transparently and consistently we make each year.

In 2021 we completed our first CDP questionnaire and received an overall “C” score, which is in line with the average performance for both Medical Equipment and Supplies sector and North America overall.

As we progress our sustainability strategy, announced in September 2020, we will continue to engage with the CDP and demonstrate the critical actions we are taking to combat climate change and strive to become a leader in our industry. Our long-term targets are being established as part of the sustainability executional roadmap we are developing, and we look forward to sharing this publicly to further demonstrate our climate strategy in action. We are also aware that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) is developing proposed requirements for companies to report their Climate-Related Financial Disclosure and that these may be enacted in the near future.