Dentists in the Field at Dawn
At dawn on Friday, August 29, 2025, members of the PDA San Pablo City Chapter were in a field in San Pablo City with gloves, seedlings and a clipboard. The occasion was the city's Simultaneous Planting of Coconut Tree Seedlings, under the banner "One Seedling, One Community, One Commitment," held during National Coconut Week.
The chapter took part as part of PDA's Ecodentistry program, which asks dental practices to reduce their environmental impact and asks chapters to show up for their communities' environmental work. In the chapter's words, the aim was to help revive the coconut industry in San Pablo City, a city whose economy and landscape have been built on the tree for generations.
The Record
The morning was bigger than one chapter. San Pablo City had organised the planting as an official Guinness World Records attempt for the most people planting coconuts simultaneously, with an adjudicator flown in to certify it on site. In a window of 15 minutes, thousands of residents across 12 barangays put about 11,000 seedlings in the ground, and the record was confirmed the same day.
The chapter's members were among those thousands, and their photos from the morning show the city's official banner behind them: "Thousand Seedlings, Coconut Week, August 29, 2025, Official Attempt in 15 Minutes."
Ecodentistry, Explained
Ecodentistry is the PDA's name for greener dental practice: less single-use plastic, amalgam handled and disposed of properly, water and power used with care, digital radiography in place of film and chemistry, and the monthly Dentist Hour in which clinics switch off lights and air-conditioning for an hour. Community planting is the visible end of it, the part a chapter can do together on a Friday morning.
The chapter kept the thread going through the year: it joined the 10th Dentist Hour on March 4, 2026. Read that story.
Sources: PDA San Pablo City Chapter Official, Philippine News Agency: San Pablo City breaks Guinness world record for coconut planting, Rappler: San Pablo City sets Guinness record.