The World Alliance for Mercury-Free Dentistry’s German partners just launched the Bonn Declaration to End Dental Amalgam, a resolution calling on their federal government to phase out amalgam use by 2025 and ensure that insurance fully covers mercury-free alternatives to amalgam.

More than 50 German organizations and researchers signed on. The nation’s leading newspaper, the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, ran a great story headlined with the words “Amalgam Aus” (Amalgam Out)! The Bonn Declaration was modeled after the Chicago Declaration to End Dental Industry Mercury Use and the Abuja (Nigeria) Declaration for Mercury-Free Dentistry for Africa an Amalgam-Free Africa.  The World Alliance will be working to make sure the Bonn Declaration has just as much impact in Germany, the European Union, and worldwide.

The World Alliance for Mercury-Free Dentistry’s campaign to phase out amalgam use now reaches into the G7 – the world’s seven major economies. In response to the European Union regulation requiring Member States to submit a national amalgam plans, the government of Italy has announced that it will phase out amalgam use by 31 December 2024!

Italy will be the first Mediterranean nation to phase out amalgam. It joins a long list of European countries to end amalgam use or announce a specific phase-out date, including Norway, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Moldova.

The European Union has taken a gigantic leap toward a decision to ban dental amalgam!
 
The 2017 EU amalgam regulation required the European Commission (the staff arm of the European Union that works under guidance from the European Council and the European Parliament) to issue a report on the feasibility of phasing out the use of dental amalgam in all EU countries. So when the European Commission held a by-invitation-only amalgam workshop in Brussels last winter, we assembled a strong team of experts from Germany, Romania, Greece, and Sweden. I was honored to testify alongside them in support of the urgent need to ban amalgam.
 
The European Commission has now released its report, which concludes “The review undertaken makes clear that the phase out of the largest remaining use of mercury in the EU – dental amalgam – is technically and economically feasible….Therefore, the Commission will present to the European Parliament and the Council in 2022 a legislative proposal to phase out the use of dental amalgam.”

The development has the potential to bring mercury-free dentistry to a vast area of 27 nations with a bigger population than the U.S. and Canada combined!

At a by-invitation-only workshop last Thursday in Brussels, the European Union took a giant step toward phasing out all amalgam use – and our European team was there to make sure it happened!

The EU amalgam regulation we won in 2017 not only banned amalgam use in children, pregnant women, and breastfeeding mothers; it also required the European Commission to issue a report on the feasibility of phasing out dental amalgam use by 2030. The draft of that report was presented at this workshop, where our European team was present in full force to support its conclusion: amalgam use in the EU should be phased out by 2025.  Continue reading →

Three more European countries – Ireland, Finland, and Slovakia – have announced plans to phase out amalgam use!

The intense European campaign run by the World Alliance for Mercury-Free Dentistry team resulted in a new European Union regulation that banned the use of amalgam in children under 15 years old, pregnant women, and breastfeeding mothers, starting 1 July 2018. That same regulation requires EU countries to submit national plans to phase down their overall use of amalgam.  Continue reading →