EDA co-founder Ina Pockrass presents at State of Green Business Forums

Pockrass spoke to her passion for transforming the dental industry into one that honors people and the planet, and to the economic benefits of the green dentistry movement.

She shared her personal journey from intellectual property attorney to green dentistry standard-bearer, and how collaboration between patients, dental practitioners and dental product manufacturers is making dentistry’s future brighter, more cost effective and easier on the Earth.

Additional speakers at the forums included California’s new Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, CEO of Clorox Don Knauss, Director and Partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson Steve Jurvetson and many more.

Each year, the State of Green Business Forum series brings together hundreds of advocates of green business to network and share the hottest trends in sustainability. The forum attracts the world’s foremost innovators, thought leaders and business executives from all industries to share sustainability opportunities realized in the prior year, and discuss the challenges ahead.

Attendees are provided with insights from the real world, what has worked and what has not, and a better understanding of how to efficiently incorporate those insights and techniques into their own organizations.

“Green business has gone from the margins to the mainstream as companies in all sectors see the business value of understanding and reducing their environmental impacts,” said Joel Makower, chairman and executive editor of GreenBiz Group, the organization sponsoring the forums.

“It’s fostering innovation, creating jobs, inspiring employees and improving public health. But such change takes bold leaders to inspire change. The Eco-Dentistry Association has created the standards and is providing the education, inspiration and innovation needed to transform the dental profession.”

The Eco-Dentistry Association combines educational resources with green practice and product standards while connecting dental patients with practitioners who share planetary values and goals. Programs such as the EDA’s GreenDOC™ program, which certifies green dental offices nationwide, and the newly established EDA Accepted Seal, which evaluates green dental products based upon their waste, pollution and energy conserving attributes, have set the standard of excellence for green practice throughout the dental industry.

“I am honored to share with the broader sustainability business community the outstanding progress and successes of the dental industry,” said Pockrass. “Like many industries, dentistry has been slow to change, but our experience at the EDA is that as the industry is beginning to understand its environmental impact and the solutions, it is adopting more and more environmentally-sound methods.This is good news for patients, practitioners, product manufacturers and distributors.”

The two-day events prepare attendees for success in the upcoming year through in-depth keynote interviews with industry leaders, advice shared by “innovisionaries,” and insightful hands-on, interactive workshops led by field experts that demonstrate exactly how to apply concepts introduced throughout the forums. Workshop topics include employee engagement, sustainability reporting, life-cycle assessment and many others.

There were also “GreenBiz Guru” sessions, which are one-hour small-group consultations held by experts on a wide range of topics, sessions in Pockrass also participated in these sessions.