I remember the first time I saw a dental 3D printer. It was at the ADA meeting in Washington, D.C. The year was 2015. Back then as a die hard technology lover I knew that 3D printing existed and I understood the concept, but I understood very little else.
I was wandering the exhibit hall of the meeting, which is one of the things I try to do at dental conventions, when I happened to see a booth that was displaying a 3D printer. Like a moth to a flame, this super cool tech drew me into the booth and before long I was engaged in a conversation with one of the company's representatives.
I was shown dentures, transitional partials, and (I think) maybe even a surgical guide. I was fascinated and mightily impressed. The things I saw looked incredible and they fit on their corresponding models perfectly. I learned the overall process and asked questions about resins.
This led me to the big question I had. “How do you come up with a design for these things?” I asked. The representative opened a laptop and showed me the design software the company had used. Back in 2015, 3D printing was just starting to creep into the dental industry and there was no dental specific design system. Instead I was shown software that was used for engineering design. The screen looked like the cockpit of a 747. I walked out of the booth and I knew that, while amazing, this tech would never make much progress in the industry unless the design process was fast and easy. Dentists don’t have the time to spend 45 minutes designing something, they need to devote that time to treating patients.
Fast forward to 2026 and I’m happy to say things have changed a lot since that day in 2015. In the 11 years since that meeting, 3D printing has seen considerable growth in offices. I think the principal reason for that growth is in how much the design process has changed. As AI continues to make rapid inroads into the dental industry, one of the areas that has been impacted the most is 3D design.
The design process has gone from a detailed and time consuming task that required a degree in engineering, to a process that frequently only requires the user to upload an intraoral scan and then click “next” until the project is ready to print. The design process has always been the bottleneck in the use of 3D printing in the dental office and those design barriers are falling fast.
Dentistry is poised at the edge of a dramatic technological shift and the market is about to reflect that. I predict in the next five years we will see a large change in how a great deal of dentistry is delivered. What we’ll see is that the simple, everyday things are going to move to being fabricated in-office. Things such as splints, occlusal guards, retainers, and surgical guides can now be easily printed, but more importantly they can also be easily designed.
That means that as dental offices seek to deliver care faster and with lower costs, more and more offices will begin utilizing 3D printers. This will allow offices to lower their lab costs on “bread and butter” cases while still delivering the precision the profession demands.
Many dental labs have already embraced 3D printing for a variety of applications. That means that many doctors are already delivering 3D printed things to their patients so they already have confidence in the technology. It’s only a small step to bring this into the dental office.
However, there’s one area that needs to be addressed. Our world is dealing with an excess amount of plastics in our environment and as offices move into this realm, we need to do our part to help ensure the health of the planet we call home.
I’ll use my experience with my coffee maker as an example. I’ve been a diehard coffee lover since my college days and that, of course, means I own a coffee maker for my home. I’m not sure who invented the coffee pod, but whoever it was should have been awarded the Nobel prize for convenience. I don’t think twice about dropping a pod into my machine and cranking out a steaming cup of dark roast. Well, I should say I didn’t think twice about it… until one day when I did.
One morning as I was placing an empty milk jug into the recycle bin it suddenly occurred to me that every coffee pod I was using was headed straight to the landfill. I’m embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it before that day, but when I realized how much plastic I was personally putting into the trash, I made the effort to search Amazon for a coffee pod I could buy that could be recycled. That led me to a company that makes compostable pods and I’ve been using them ever since. In a similar way that dentistry has moved to using amalgam separators to keep mercury out of the environment, we need to make a similar approach to recycling 3D scrap.
For those of you unfamiliar with the 3D printing process let me explain. The resins used in 3D printing are liquid. These resins are photopolymerized by the printer in a manner that is similar to how doctors place composite resins. The printing resins are cured in layers. Because they are liquid and polymerized in layers, the printer software creates little bars of plastic under the printed project as it is created to keep it in the correct shape. These bars are called “supports” and they are a necessary part of the 3D printing process.
When the project is completed and fully cured, a human then removes the supports and polishes the completed printed project. This process of removing the supports and polishing is easy and doesn’t take much time. However the cured resin supports now need to be disposed of. That means that every printed project is creating a certain amount of waste.
Now add to that the idea of “pods”. We’re now seeing printers for dentistry that create small projects like crowns and veneers through the Keurig concept of single use, resin filled pods. These pods make printing incredibly easy, but in addition to the supports, the pods themselves are also made of plastic and need to be disposed of properly.
As more and more offices move into 3D printing, the amount of waste that will be generated from this amazing technology is going to be significant. So what can dentistry do to properly and ethically deal with this problem that is looming on the horizon?
Just like my empty gallon bottle of milk, dentistry needs to recycle these leftovers. Of course if you want to recycle plastics you’ll come across a problem. Not all plastics are the same. My gallon milk bottle is recycled by my local trash collector. My plastic grocery bags need to be returned to the grocery store for proper recycling. Printed 3D resins also require a specific recycling process and they cannot be disposed of in just any recycling bin.
Fortunately there is a simple answer. For over 25 years DRNA (Dental Recycling North America) has been in the business of helping dentistry properly dispose of waste. The company provides amalgam separators, sharps disposal, and disposal of pharmaceuticals as some of its services. This year DRNA has launched a new effort that allows dentistry to recycle the waste from 3D printers.
It’s an incredibly easy solution, so allow me to explain how it works. DRNA sends the dental office a shipping container. Inside is a 2.5 gallon bucket with a liner and a return shipping label. The liner is placed inside the bucket. Any 3D printer waste, whether it is cured supports, resin pods, or empty resin bottles, is simply placed in the bucket. When the bucket is full, the office places the bucket into the shipping container, attaches the label, and notifies DRNA. The company ships a new 2.5 gallon bucket kit to the office while the office ships the full bucket back to DRNA. The DRNA solution meets federal, state, and local hazard waste regulations, is an easy one-step process, and provides full documentation. The entire process is so easy, even I can follow the instructions!
Failing to implement recycling is a looming potential problem, but we already have the solution. Here’s my request to manufacturers. Let’s begin to address this issue now. By partnering with a reputable company like DRNA, manufacturers can make the process of recycling part of the normal workflow as offices purchase printing systems and begin using them.
I have implemented many workflow changing technologies over my career, so I say this with experience. It is much easier to change a major workflow once than trying to implement small changes to that same workflow over time. Establishing the recycling process from the beginning and implementing it during training will teach offices that recycling is as critical to the process as post-curing.
Once a process has been ingrained into a system, it becomes simply ‘one more part’ of the process. In order to establish ‘best practices’ and to prevent 3D printing waste from ending up in our landfills a concerted effort needs to be made to incorporate recycling into the process *now*. Any other option is simply “kicking the can down the road.”
