How To Reduce Waste In Your Lab and Extend the Life of Your Equipment

1. Develop preventive maintenance schedules for all equipment critical to the manufacturing process as required by FDA and DAMAS by using SafeLink's Quality Connection materials.
2. Document repair records and review the records regularly to determine if equipment should be retired and replaced - another requirement by FDA and DAMAS as shown in SafeLink's Quality Connection materials.
3. If equipment requires calibration ensure that it is properly calibrated as required by FDA and DAMAS as shown in SafeLink's Quality Connection materials.
4. Keep areas where equipment is located clean and free of debris as required by FDA, DAMAS, and OSHA. Use SafeLink's Quality Connection and Health and Safety materials.
5. Train workers on proper use of the equipment and provide operating instructions at point of use as required by FDA and DAMAS as shown in SafeLink's Quality Connection materials.
6. Make sure there are no tears or distortions in the impression.
7. Use burs, stones, discs, and diamonds for their full life. Don’t partially use them and discard them.
8. Use the water to stone ratios that are with the stone. They will usually tell you how much water and stone is needed for each model.
9. Weigh out wax patterns to determine how much metal to use in each casting.
10. Cast to the most accurate thickness possible. There will be less grinding and therefore less waste.

Using Cold-Sterilants, i.e. Glutaraldehyde (excerpted from the 2003 CDC MMWR for Infection Control in Dental Settings)

Heat-sensitive critical and semicritical instruments can be sterilized by immersing them in liquid chemical germicides registered by FDA as sterilants. When using a liquid chemical germicide for sterilization, certain poststerilization procedures are essential. To use this method, items need to be:

1) rinsed with sterile water after removal to remove toxic or irritating residues;

2) handled using sterile gloves and dried with sterile towels; and

3) delivered to the point of use in an aseptic manner.

Because of these limitations and because liquid chemical sterilants can require approximately 12 hours of complete immersion, they are almost never used to sterilize instruments. These chemicals are more often used for high-level disinfection. Shorter immersion times (12--90 minutes) are used to achieve high-level disinfection of semicritical instruments or items. These powerful, sporicidal chemicals (e.g., glutaraldehyde, peracetic acid, and hydrogen peroxide) are highly toxic.

Because of their lack of chemical resistance to glutaraldehydes, medical gloves are not an effective barrier. Other factors that might apply when using these chemicals are the addition of room exhaust ventilation or ensuring 10 air exchanges/hour, keeping the container closedwith a lid at all times, testing for proper dilution, and disposal practices to ensure worker and environmental safety. For all of these reasons, using heat-sensitive semicritical items that must be processed with liquid chemical germicides is discouraged; heat-tolerant or disposable alternatives are available for the majority of such items.

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