Tip of the Week

Convert Your School to Greener Cleaners

If The Green Guide's recent report on "The Top 10 Green Schools in the U.S.: 2006" has you wondering where to begin to green your school, we would suggest you look first to change the cleaning products used. As you probably already know, cleaners used on a daily basis in schools could pollute indoor air with irritating and allergenic fragrances and chemicals linked to neurological problems, hormone disruption and asthma.

At the urging of a small group of parents, a reluctant director of facilities for the Port Washington, New York, school district, tested two greener cleaning products in just one of the schools in his district: Envirox's H2Orange2 #117, a multipurpose concentrate, and Grout Safe 130, a desk cleaner. He was so pleased with the results - the greener cleaning products worked as well as the conventional products he'd been using - that he now uses them in all the schools he manages.

Switch your school over to greener cleaning products. Here's how:

1. Get a list of green institutional cleaning products by going to Grassrootsinfo.org and follow the links to a list of approved institutional cleaning products.

2. If the cleaners your child's school uses are not on the green list, ask to see the Materials Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for each product it does use. MSDS, however, reveal only those ingredients that have acute and immediate rather than long-term effects. Unhealthy ingredients typically used in school cleaning products include: 2-butoxyethanol, petroleum distillates, chlorine (sodium hypochlorite), ammonia, quaternary ammonium compounds, alkylphenol ethoxylates and acids.

3. With your research and the list of alternative products as back-up, ask your school to try them. If they are resistant, get more parents involved.

4. Make it clear to your school that this won't necessarily cost more money. One parent we spoke with found that schools tended to use too many products, and when they switched to the greener products she recommended, they used fewer, more all-purpose cleaners and ended up saving money.

5. For more inspiration on greening your school, read The Green Guide's "Top 10 Green Schools in the U.S.: 2006" special report.

© The Green Guide, 2008

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