LEAS project greens school districts cleaning

Students and staff in two major Lower Mainland school districts will see their schools cleaned using non-toxic, environmentally-certified cleaning products, thanks to an innovative project initiated by the Labour Environmental Alliance Society and some green thinking by custodians and management in the Burnaby and New Westminster School Districts.

Nearly 30,000 students in the two districts will benefit from the changes, in addition to more than 200 custodians who use the products. The change will also result in environmental contaminants, such as ethoxylated nonyl phenols and NTA removed from the waste stream.

Integration of the new green products was completed by the Burnaby School District this month, while New Westminster will complete the process in the fall, as it moves the province’s largest high school, New Westminster Secondary, over to the new system. Elementary schools in New Westminster began using the new products in the spring and all of them, as well as the district’s two middle schools were to make the shift by the summer.

In Burnaby, “we’ve made the changeover 100 per cent,” said Burnaby School District maintenance supervisor Scott Stove. “Every one of the products that was flagged in the project was taken out and we basically started fresh.”

LEAS began the project, called Training for a Non-Toxic Workplace in 2007, with funding from WorkSafeBC’s Innovations at Work program. LEAS research coordinator Sean Griffin worked with occupational health and safety committees at three school districts and two major hotel properties to review cleaning products and identify toxic ingredients associated with chronic health effects. On the basis of the review, LEAS made recommendations to OH&S committees for product changes that would eliminate the toxic ingredients.

“We found a number of products that contained carcinogens and reproductive toxins in both the school districts and the hotels,” Griffin said. “The OH&S committees were unaware of the health effects of those ingredients but once they learned about them, they took action.”

On all of the sites, LEAS was successful in getting the joint committees in the school districts and the hotels to replace or eliminate products containing carcinogens and reproductive toxins.

After reviewing their products, both the Burnaby and New Westminster products decided to go the extra mile and introduce a green cleaning program using products certified by either Canada’s Environmental Choice program or Green Seal in the U.S. Criteria for both program prohibit the use of ingredients listed as carcinogens, reproductive toxins or endocrine-disrupting chemicals and certified products are generally considered to set the standard for the industry.

Significantly, that major change came in the two districts where all custodians, as well as OH&S committee members had been involved in product review workshops. “At the end of the day, the change had to be made by management, but there was support and even pressure from custodians, because of what they’d learned about the products they were using,” said Griffin.

The WorkSafeBC-funded project demonstrated that using science to create awareness about chemical exposure in the workplace can have a positive effect in promoting environmental change.

According to the project’s final report, filed with WorkSafeBC earlier this year, “the information provided in the project and the awareness of potentially toxic product ingredients that it created among participants generated a high degree of motivation. That in turn led to significant changes in product use and procurement in all sites.”

LEAS also released an expanded and revised version of its Cleaners and Toxins Guide as part of the project, featuring photos of custodians who participated in the project.

A pd download of the Training for a Non-Toxic Workplace final report is available here.

A pd download of the new Cleaners and Toxins Guide is available here.

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