Helping Kids Breathe Easier
Campaigns to rid schools of toxins promote eco-friendly cleaners
By Andrew Korfhage
Patti Wood has always been serious about keeping toxins away from her family.
She cleans her house only with non-toxic, environmentally friendly cleaners, avoiding petrochemicals and other synthetic ingredients in favor of all-natural products. She keeps pesticides out of her yard and garden, and shops organic for almost all the food in her home - including the cat food! Concerned about toxins in her neighborhood when her daughters were small, Patti created a pesticide-free buffer zone around her family's house by speaking with each of her neighbors about the dangers of pesticides, convincing everyone on her street to go all-natural with their lawn care.
Still, as careful as Patti is at home, her daughters spent huge portions of their time at school. One day, while Patti was tending the organic garden she'd started at her daughter's elementary school, a groundskeeper approached, spray can of pesticides strapped to his back, ready to fumigate. Patti turned him away, but the experience taught her that to create a truly toxin-free environment for her children, she'd have to work on reforming their school as well.
"That day in the garden encouraged Patti to go to the school administration and start making changes," says her husband Doug, recounting the tale. "This was supposed to be an organic garden, and she saw it as a way of showing people that a lot of the chemicals we use just aren't really necessary."
Today, with their children grown, Patti and Doug Wood run Grassroots Environmental Education, a Port Washington-based nonprofit that goes beyond pesticides in showing people how the use of toxic chemicals is not really necessary. With a major initiative teaching parents about the importance of using non-toxic cleaners in schools, Grassroots has spent the last six years leading the way toward a healthier, more environmentally friendly school system in New York state.
"Children are uniquely vulnerable to toxins in a way that adults aren't," says Doug Wood. "People think of children as little adults, but they're not. Physiologically they're still developing, and behaviorally they interact with their environment in ways adults do not. They roll on the floor, they put their hands in their mouths, they put their heads down on the desks. That's why it's so important for parents to be concerned about the kinds of cleaning products used in their children's schools."
Why Green Cleaners? The switch to greener cleaners provides a host of benefits for schools, and benefits society at large from the beginning to end of the supply chain, protecting workers from handling toxic chemicals at production plants and during use, and keeping toxins from washing into the environment after use.
"Treating our commons - the air and water and natural systems - as infinitely capable of absorbing insult no longer works," says Arthur Weissman, president and CEO of Green Seal, Inc., which certifies environmentally friendly cleaning products. "The human body, it turns out, can be very sensitive to chemicals that it has not evolved or adapted to, and the same holds true for all the living systems with which we share this planet."
Rochelle Davis, director of the Chicago-based Healthy Schools Campaign, cites four clear reasons why green cleaning in schools is important. Greener cleaning products, Davis says, help students stay healthy and learn better at school, protect the health of school custodial staff, increase the lifespan of facilities, and help preserve the environment.
"Students spend most of their waking hours in school," says Davis. "It is appropriate for parents to inquire of their principal, or someone at the district level, about the cleaners being used in their children's schools. To pick just one example, [according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] students miss 14 million days of school [in America each year] because of asthma exacerbated by poor indoor air quality. This can often be tied to the types of products being used in a school."
What's more, a 2002 study co-sponsored by the U.S. Environ-mental Protection Agency and several California city governments found that six of every 100 janitors loses time from work due to an on-the-job chemical injury each year, with injuries ranging from respiratory problems to burns to eye irritation.
The list of toxic ingredients commonly found in conventional cleaning products is long.
Sodium hypochlorite, found in all-purpose cleaners and chlorine bleach products, can cause asthmatic symptoms and other respiratory problems. Ammonia-based products can irritate the eyes and lungs and cause headaches. Formaldehyde, used as a preservative in many conventional cleaning products, is a suspected human carcinogen. Perhaps most commonly, the non-essential fragrances found in many conventional cleaning products can trigger asthma.
Relative to their size, children take in more of these contaminants through repeated exposure than adults, which increases their risk for the health problems associated with conventional cleaning products. (Concerned parents can look up the negative health effects of just about any conventional cleaning product ingredient in Environmental Defense's database, www.scorecard. org/chemical-profiles.)
Signs of the Shift Starting this September, by a first-of-its-kind state mandate, all public schools in the state of New York will be required by law to use environmentally friendly cleaners as certified by Green Seal.
Some cities, like Santa Monica, California, and Chicago, Illinois, have already adopted their own greener cleaners initiatives for local school systems, and report great success. Santa Monica, for example, reports that annual expenditures on cleaning products have actually decreased by five percent since implementing its policy more than a decade ago, and Chicago schools report three percent fewer student absences due to illness since implementing a policy two years ago.
Rochelle Davis cites alliances between parents, custodial unions, and concerned citizens as key to Chicago adopting its green cleaning standards. She notes that the plan began as a pilot project in 10 schools, as green cleaning proponents worked to counter the common misperceptions that eco-friendly products are less effective than conventional products or are prohibitively expensive.
"Those are two common barriers that are easy to overcome once schools have experience with the products," says Davis. "Plus, our mayor is very committed to environmental stewardship, so Chicago had other pilots running in libraries and city-run facilities at the time, showing how effective and competitively priced green cleaners can be; it's not just schools."
Anthony Crisafulli, vice president of ATRA Janitorial Company in New Jersey, agrees with Davis. He's been a cleaning products supplier for almost 25 years and sees the switch to greener cleaners as the most significant change yet in his industry. "Once schools find out these products work as well as conventional products with their chemical ingredients known to be liver and kidney toxins, known to cause learning disabilities and so forth, they say, 'Why in the world would we keep using them?' says Crisafulli, who has seen about 35 New Jersey schools shift their cleaning supplies to green alternatives in the past two years.
"I absolutely think it's only a matter of time before New Jersey mandates this by law like New York has, and then the other states will follow," says Crisafulli. "That's certainly been the trend."
In fact, New Jersey did mandate last January that state offices use green cleaners. With growing awareness and citizen pressure, the prospects are good that schools in New Jersey - and beyond - will also be required to meet green cleaner standards. Andrew Korfhage is an associate editor for Co-op America, a nonprofit membership organization that educates consumers about socially and environmentally responsible purchasing and investing. His editorials on sustainability topics appear in small- to mid-sized newspapers around the country. He cleans his own floors with all-natural castille soap scented with eucalyptus and tea tree oils.
Help Shift Cleaners Market, Win $5,000!
To get the word out that so many green cleaners now exist at no additional cost to institutional buyers, we've launched a campaign to educate school officials, teachers, and parents on how to buy them for use in schools.
As an incentive, New American Dream is offering several $5,000 prizes to schools to raise awareness. We gave the first prize in April to Jill Butterfield, the Parent Teacher Association President for Baldwin Elementary School in Quincy, Illinois.
Our second sweepstakes is open from now until September 21. Anyone can enter their school to win by simply completing the registration form at www.newdream.org/cleanschools.
When New American Dream began its work to promote environmentally preferable cleaning products in 2001, no uniform standards existed defining "green cleaning products." In fact, institutions interested in buying safer cleaners unintentionally made it difficult for manufacturers to respond to market demand by using different criteria. New American Dream organized a working group of institutional buyers to agree on a set of standards for cleaning products. We then helped to rally buyers around environmental criteria developed by the independent certifying body Green Seal. Institutions such as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the City of Santa Monica, California, created enough initial demand for green cleaners that companies reformulated their products to meet the New American Dream working group's criteria. Now hundreds of products are certified as meeting rigorous third-party environmental and safety standards!
Sustainable Steps for Schools
1. Use only all-natural, bio-based cleaners for surface cleaning (windows, desks, mirrors, dust mop treatments, etc.). General surface cleaners should be free from fragrances and dyes, free from petrochemicals, and non-aerosol.
2. Disinfectants and sanitizers should not be used for general cleaning and should not be used when children are present. They should be used sparingly, for body fluid spills and other public health concerns or when required by the Department of Health.
3. Products for floor stripping and finishing should be used only when schools are vacant. Conventional cleaners in this category are highly toxic; schools should look for products without styrene (a suspected carcinogen) or heavy metals.
4. When possible, pesticides should be eliminated around school property in favor of an organic (or "integrated") pest management program.
5. Idling diesel school buses pose a health hazard to children who must breathe their fumes while waiting. Buses should sit with their engines off.
6. Paper products for the lunch room and restrooms should use the highest post-consumer recycled content available and not be processed with chlorine.
Sources: Grassroots Environmental Education, Healthy Schools Campaign, Healthy Schools Network
Resources
Environmental Grassroots Education - www.grassrootsinfo.org. On the Grassroots website, click on "Safe Schools" for more tips on how to improve the cleaning practices at your school, or click on "Films," to order short films about greener cleaning in schools.
EPA Cleaning Products Purchasing Wizard - www.epa.gov/oppt/epp/pubs/ cleaners/select/matrix.htm. Developed by the EPA's Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Program, the Wizard selects products based on single or multiple specified environmental attributes, such as recyclable packaging, potential for skin irritation, or potential for air pollution.
Green Seal - www.greenseal.org. The certification program for greener cleaners, Green Seal offers product recommendations and tips for a greener cleaning program on its website.
Healthy Schools Network - www.healthyschools.org. The Healthy Schools Network promotes the development of national and state policies to improve the environmental health of school facilities and provides a web-based "Green Squad" environmental education program for middle-schoolers.
Healthy Schools Campaign (HSC) - www.healthyschoolscampaign.org. This fall, HSC will publish the "Quick and Easy Guide to Green Cleaning in Schools," a how-to guide for school administrators and custodial staff. For a copy of the guide, email New American Dream at RPN@newdream.org.
Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH) - www.masscosh.org. MassCOSH works with a broad base of professionals to promote safe workplaces, schools, and communities. The group helped to pioneer municipal green cleaning work and their recent report, "Who's Sick at School," discusses the relationship between asthma and indoor air quality in Boston public schools.