Environmental sustainability and procurement: purchasing products for the dental setting.

Sustainable procurement, when applied to dentistry, is the practice by which the dental surgery addresses environmental, social and ethical considerations when purchasing goods or services. This paper focuses on procurement and how the dental team can influence what is purchased in order to become more sustainable. It is the authors' hope that this series of papers will stimulate interest, debate and discussion and, as well as being economically responsible, ultimately motivate or inspire dentistry to be more socially and environmentally sustainable which in turn will help promote health and illness prevention.