When you’re running a dental business, any new stream of revenue is one worth exploring. Most dental practice owners are dealing with a high level of debt. Buying a dental practice can cost anywhere from
50% to 100% of the practice’s gross receipts from the previous year, which can come out to hundreds of thousands of dollars and take years to pay off. On top of that, some practice owners are still paying off their student debts. For many practice owners, any method of increasing revenues is worth exploring. One underutilized revenue stream is selling dental scrap.
Dental scrap buyers can supplement your practice’s income without much hassle on your part.
Before you start collecting it, you’re probably asking: exactly what use is dental scrap to anybody? The answer is precious metals. Dentistry relies heavily on
high noble alloys made from precious metals like gold, platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, and others. These metal alloys are used for crowns, in-lays, on-lays, etc. These high noble alloys will also include other noble and base metals like copper, indium, zinc, or tin to give the precious metals more strength than they have naturally. The benefit of using gold in dentistry is that it is extremely unreactive. It is highly resistant to corrosion, rust, bacteria, acids, and all of the other hazards that metal might otherwise face in your mouth. It can last for decades with the right care and maintenance.
Individual pieces of dental scraps do not contain high quantities of precious metals, but gold, palladium, platinum, and other precious metals used in dentistry can be worth thousands of dollars per ounce. The exact price changes with the markets, and dental scraps buyers will account for the cost of recovering precious metals from the rest of the dental scrap, plus melting down those precious metals to recycle them. What dental scraps buyers usually do is collect all of the scrap that you send in, recover the
precious metals, and then distribute payment based on how much precious metal they recover by weight. It can be difficult to determine how much recoverable precious metal you have before the process is complete, so it’s important to work with dental scrap buyers whom you can trust.
How Can Your Dentist Business Start Collecting Dental Scrap?
A good dental scraps buyer will make the process as easy as possible. Dental scrap is a supplement to your practice’s revenue, and it shouldn’t take up too much of your or your staff’s time. What they should do is send you a free dental scraps collection kit. This will allow you to store dental scraps until you have a sufficient quantity to make it worth sending in. The most important thing you need to worry about when collecting scrap is getting permission from the patient. Dental scrap should be easy to collect and add some much-needed free revenue to your practice.