Dental Air Force

Our dental office (www.ppierodds.com) was one of the first in the country to collect the mercury fillings (as well as all contaminants in the office systems). Municipalities were removing 99.9% of the contaminants prior to the dental offices being first asked, then legislated to remove them. The reason was that the federal government felt that the contaminants should be removed at the source (ie: dental office). Our office has not placed a mercury filling in 25 years, although we remove the old fillings. Today every dentist office in the country will be forced to install a “pump out” system. As you can imagine this is very costly and drives the cost of dentistry up.

However, in the name of energy efficiency, fluorescent light bulbs have widely taken over the old incandescent bulb. These are a major source of mercury.

One bulb has the potential for contaminating 6,000 gallons of water when not of properly. How many people throw these bulbs away, instead of physically taking them to a hazardous material recycling center? Every bulb that winds up in the garbage (even the “recycle” part of the trash collection) and breaks (which is probably every one of them), contaminates the air, water and soil.

There are over a billion of these bulbs that are thrown away every year! Go to http://www.ehow.com/list_6525988_dangers-curly-fluorescent-light-bulbs.html?utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=test11 for lots of details.

I know there are not a billion mercury fillings that are being removed and disposed of in the country every year.

So what is the bigger source of contaminant – the mercury filling or the fluorescent light bulb???? The dental industry had a recovery and removal system in place through the municipality’s water treatment systems. The Federal government has added an extra cost of containment to this issue when the system already had a very good solution.

The fluorescent bulb issue does not have a containment system in place that is effective, and is far worse than the dental mercury issue. How many mercury fillings to you have in your mouth ? And how many fluorescent light bulbs do you have in your house?