4 Feb 2025  •  Blog, Practice Management, Uncategorized  •  7min read

Turning Scrap into Charity Gold with Leticia Casanova of Gold for Kids

Dr Leticia Casanova, periodontist and co-founder of the charity Gold for Kids, explains more about the charity and its work.

It was when my husband and I started our practice, London Periodontic Implants and Dentistry, in 2013 that I first became aware of the waste metal produced in a dental practice. At the time, I didn’t know that it had value, but my husband did. So, we kept it to one side until we decided what we wanted to do with it.

In 2016 I became a mother for the first time, and I found I was very sensitive to any news items about the suffering of small children. So, we decided not to just stand by and watch but to try to start a project to help children living in underprivileged circumstances and to be part of the solution. That was when we combined the precious metals we were storing in our practice and set about melting it to raise funds for these charities.

Everything was very informal at first. We didn’t have a website or any literature. I tried speaking to other dentists to ask if they wanted to donate their waste metal, and some of them wanted a link to the website or a pamphlet. So, a couple of friends donated their waste metal just on face value. And between the three of us, we raised £5,000. That gave us the background to be able to register Gold for Kids as a charity because to be able to do that, you need to have done some work, and the fundraising threshold to register with the Charity Commission is £5,000 a year. So that’s how it all started in 2019.

Gathering waste metal
Traditionally, most dental practices had crown and bridge waste metal because when you replace a crown, what do you do with the old crown? Or when a tooth is too poor to continue restoring, eventually you remove it, and if it has the crown on it, what do you do with that crown? You usually store it in a jar. Sometimes a scrap metal company would come into the practice and pay the practice an average of what they think the metal is worth depending on the weight.

Obviously, these companies are interested in making a profit. Which means they would hand over less than the full value of that metal because they need to cover their overheads and make a profit. The practice would then keep that money either to reinvest in the practice or put it on one side for entertainment or Christmas parties, and so on.

What we wanted to do was move away from that sort of behaviour because, strictly speaking, the metal doesn’t belong to the practice; it belongs to the patient because they paid for that crown originally. We thought we could give the patient a voice about what they would like to do with the waste metal. Let’s face it: if you give it back to the patient, they can’t do much with one single crown. However, if you ask the patient whether they would like to donate it to charity, then surely, they’d be happy to do so.

Various contributions
We started sounding out patients in our practice. People got quite involved. We started with old broken jewellery and crown and bridge work. One patient brought crown and bridge work that had belonged to their mother. It was stored in a little box, and they didn’t know what to do with it. So, they gave it to us. Another patient brought £5,800 worth of jewellery that we then either sold or melted. We liaised with a jeweller to sell the antique pieces that were in good condition at a better price. The pieces that were broken or worth less, we then melted. People brought us out-of-fashion jewellery, broken chains, the back of an earring, and all those types of metals. When we had a few items, we amalgamated all the metals and took them to the place that the scrap metal companies go to do a melt, or an assay.

All the metals get melted and assayed. The assayers then assess what type of metal is contained in the bars that are produced after the melt. Normally it’ll be a combination of gold, platinum, palladium, and silver. Platinum and palladium have become more valuable as they are used in the manufacture of mobile phones. Gold has always been very valuable, but even more so now.

We then take those bars and sell them to the melt and assay company at market value. For example, the last melt was worth £6,180. So, that’s how we get the cash to distribute and to give grants to charities that are doing really good work.

We work with UK-based charities that help children between 0 and 18 years old and that have the purpose of improving the quality of life of underprivileged children. The very first charity we donated to was Barnardo’s, and the following year we donated to NSPCC. When we started to make a bit more money, we started creating a portfolio.

Supporting 11 charities
So again, Barnardo’s and NSPCC got some money, and then we included Transforming Lives For Good, which is a smaller charity that offers coaching and sets up hubs to provide lunches during school holidays because many children depend on that meal from school. But when everybody’s on holiday for the whole six weeks of summer, half-term, and Easter, they don’t get that. So, they create hubs.

When we started to understand the facts about these hubs, it really got us committed. You only need about £3,000 to start a hub. And then we started donating to Punk against Poverty, and other charities such as The Felix Project, which collects food that is in good condition that would otherwise go to waste and then distributes it to food banks, charities and so on.

So, we now support 11 charities and around 33 practices support Gold for Kids. But only 33. There are so many dentists out there that don’t even know about this project. At the moment, they are either giving their waste metal to the scrap metal company and keeping the money themselves, while some of them are still throwing out this crown and bridgework because they didn’t know it had value.

It would be great if more practices got involved, and there are several ways in which they can contribute. They could become donors themselves, or they could also become ambassadors where they tell their colleagues about this project. They can donate both their crown and bridge work or waste or broken jewellery from their patients too.

Right now, it’s about getting the word out there so people understand that Gold for Kids is a good thing to get involved with. We are all resistant to change, but in this particular instance, I believe it’s a change for the good.

You can hear a longer conversation with Leticia in Practice Plan Bodcast.

Dr Leticia Casanova

Periodontist and Co-Founder of Gold for Kids

Dr Casanova graduated in dentistry from the University of Oviedo, Spain in 2006. Following a period of work in private practice she moved to New York where she completed 2 years full-time training in Periodontology at New York University College of Dentistry. She completed her PhD in Medicine in 2012, where she investigated the links between Periodontal disease and systemic diseases such as Diabetes.

Since arriving in the UK in 2009 Dr Casanova has restricted her practice to periodontology and implant dentistry offering a full range of periodontal treatments including regenerative and cosmetic procedures, microsurgical periodontal plastic surgery (gum surgery), implant dentistry and bone augmentation procedures. She is a Specialist Clinical Teacher at KCL Guy’s Hospital.

Dr Casanova is a member of the British Society of Periodontology, American Academy of Periodontology, Royal Society of Medicine and the Association of Dental Implantology UK. She regularly attends National and International conferences and publishes and presents her work in peer reviewed dental journals and dental meetings.

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