Cleaners and Toxins

• Cleaners and Toxins Guide (pdf)
  
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The Cleaners, Toxins and the Ecosystem Project is the flagship campaign of the Labour Environmental Alliance Society, a project that combines environmental research and activism with basic shop-floor health and safety work.

The concept is simple: working with health and safety committees in a number of industrial and institutional work sites, environmental researchers  review the ingredients in the cleaning products that are being used to identify those that may be toxic to workers and to the receiving environment. The committees then work with employers and cleaning product suppliers to substitute the toxic cleaners with safer, environmentally-preferable cleaners.

Key to the project is the basic right of workers and the community to know what toxins may be in the workplace or the broader environment and to take action to protect both themselves and the ecosystem.

Inspired by the Prevent Cancer campaigns of both the Canadian Labour Congress and the Canadian Auto Workers, the campaign was originally conceived following reports from fish plant workers of adverse reactions to cleaning products they were using.

LEAS began work on Cleaners, Toxins and the Ecosystem in early 2001, with participation from a food processing plant, a fish processing operation, a major supermarket, a multi-tenant office, a long term care facility, a large recreational complex and a major school district. Since then, numerous sites have been involved, including several school districts. Locals of several unions have been involved, including the Canadian Auto Workers, Canadian Union of Public Employees, Hospital Employees Union and United Food and Commercial Workers, as well as a number of environmental organizations, including Reach for Unbleached and T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation.

In 2006-2007, LEAS launched a new related project, called Training for a Non-Toxic Workplace, with funding from WorkSafeBC under its Innovations at Work program. LEAS researchers worked with a number of school districts and hotel properties, providing training and cleaning product reviews. As a result of the project, OH&S committees made significant changes, eliminating the toxic products that were identified and in some cases, moving to environmentally-certified products.

 
As part of the project, LEAS published a new and expanded edition of the popular Cleaners and Toxins Guide. The 28-page booklet lists a number of toxic cleaning product ingredients, along with their health and environmental effects, and offers strategies for eliminating them from the workplace and the environment. The Guide is available as a pdf download, or printed copies can be ordered through the LEAS office.

Project participants have given the project high marks. “Thanks for the wake-up call,” one janitor at the office complex told the joint committee. Workers at the long-term care facility welcomed the research information provided them in the course of the project: “We had no idea what was in these cleaning products that we’re using every day,” said one steward.

Cleaners, Toxins and the Ecosystem effectively bring together the environmental the knowledge and research skills of the environmental movement into the workplace and trains health and safety committees to use those research tools. It makes a direct link between the health and safety of workers and the overall health of the environment — and enlists the support of workers in the broader campaign to create environmental change.

Already committees at participating sites have eliminated a number of carcinogenic and other toxic ingredients from the workplace and the environment. Many of the chemicals targeted are endocrine-disrupters and ozone-depleting substances that can cause serious ecosystem damage.

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