We’ve Sold a Lot of Plastic
That goes for all of us in dentistry.
Modern dentistry is built on plastic. If your practice offers products like retainers, aligners, and night guards, you’re part of the story of plastic. Even if you offer only wire braces instead of aligners, you likely use plastic products in each office visit – often single-use, rarely recyclable.
But it particularly applies here…
The team behind GT Smiles has been specializing in plastics for dentistry for decades. We’re really quite good at it, so we’ve sold a lot of it.
We’ve sold hundreds of tons of our GT FLEX ® plastics, used to make millions of aligners and retainers around the world. It’s made us one of the biggest providers of thermoforming plastics in dentistry for years… and yet we still represent only a small fraction of the total plastic used in this industry.
If any of this sounds like a brag, it isn’t. It’s an acknowledgement that we’ve been part of a growing problem. And it’s the motivation driving us to develop better plastic alternatives for the future, like GT FLEX ® GREEN.
Toward a Plant-Based Alternative
For background, it’s worth taking a quick look at how we describe GT FLEX ® GREEN to patients. But if you’re sticking to this page, here are the important things to know:
- “Plastic” is not inherently evil – it’s a material-science term that refers simply to something that can change shape when heated and then retain that shape when cooled. The term “plastic” includes no commentary on the material’s ingredients or how long it lasts: the two areas where the actual problems arise.
- Petroleum is the problem – when most people say “plastic” they mean traditional plastic, which is made from petroleum-derived components, and which includes most of the plastics you encounter each day. The petroleum-derived components and helper chemicals used with them are the source of concerns about toxicity and long-lasting microplastics.
Initial Steps Away from Petroleum
Here’s something that might surprise you:
“Plant-based” usually means just less petroleum, not zero petroleum. Many “plant-based” and “bio-based” plastic alternatives contain a portion – and sometimes a majority – of petroleum-based components to make them work.
Our initial goal was to reduce – not eliminate – the amount of petroleum-based components in our material. Why?
- We reasoned (incorrectly, as later became obvious) that any reduction in petroleum would be better than nothing, and
- Even though we were really good at polymer chemistry by this point, we couldn’t even imagine a way to get a working product that had 0% petroleum-based inputs.
Why is it so difficult to get to zero petroleum?
Polymer (plastics) chemistry is all about creating a “weave” of long molecules. The more regular the molecules, the more regular the weave you can generate, and the more consistent (and durable) the final product.
Petroleum provides incredibly regular long molecules for you to weave into your plastics. Plant-based inputs tend to provide “wilder” molecules (with less consistent structure) that are difficult to turn into predictable, durable weaves.
Adding a bit of petroleum helps tame the wild.
Ready to launch! (Not so fast…)
It still took a lot of work, but we achieved our initial goal years ago.
We had a “plant-based” plastic alternative with all the material properties we knew were necessary for products like aligners and retainers. And it had an even lower percentage of petroleum-based inputs than we initially targeted.
We were actually preparing for launch – we had put the first page up on our website related to the project – when we started receiving emails from patients who were searching for plastic alternatives:
I am looking to replace my plastic retainer to help lighten the toxic load on my body.
I’m freaked out by wearing plastic aligners that I’ve read definitely put microplastics into our systems.
Toxicity and microplastics in the body. Thousands of emails poured in, and almost all of them mentioned these same two concerns, both tied directly to petroleum content.
Whether or not less petroleum is better for the environment, it became clear that patients really wanted 0% petroleum for their health.
So we took our ready-to-launch material with less (but not zero) petroleum, put it back on the shelf, and started over – from scratch.
The Road to 100% Petroleum-Free
Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill
We ended up exploring many paths to achieve 0% petroleum – most leading in the wrong direction or to dead ends – until a series of recent breakthroughs led us to the GT FLEX ® GREEN material we have to offer today.
As far as we’re aware, it’s the world’s first, 100% traditional-plastic-free (meaning 100% petroleum-component-free) material designed for aligners, retainers, night guards, and related dental devices.
We owe an enormous thanks to the all the patients and dentists who learned about our journey and who continued to reach out and encourage us along the way. Your enthusiasm kept us focused and excited.
We’re so glad we all got here together. And we hope to keep helping you smile for years to come.
– The GT Smiles Team
If you haven’t already, you can learn more about how we got here from our co-founder, Marc.