Boston goes green to clean

[Guest guest]

Clean goes green

It's a dirty business, but companies need to start using safer

cleaning products, activists say

September 30, 2007

Boston Globe, Boston

By Ric Kahn, Globe Staff

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/09/30/clean_goes_green

/

Her daughter's eyes were pink and puffy. The child's nose was

scratchy and runny.

Figueroa of Jamaica Plain did everything she could to make her

daughter well: She bought one medicine after another; did more wash

than a 24-hour laundromat; gave to charity her daughter's stuffed

animals that might be carrying dust, including the little monkey

that young clung to for comfort.

Still the allergies raged.

missed so many days early on in elementary school she had

to repeat a grade and say goodbye to childhood friends, her mother

says.

But once she left that school, Figueroa says, the problem

disappeared. It wasn't until about a year ago, after Figueroa went

to work as a health advocate for the Committee for Boston Public

Housing, that she surmised the allergy trigger might have been right

under her daughter's dripping nose.

In an effort to keep her former schoolhouse clean, Figueroa

believes, custodians may have inadvertently been discharging

contaminants into the air when they scrubbed.

" I didn't link it, " says Figueroa, 42. " You always think that school

is a safe place. "

Now, the Boston public schools are transforming themselves into

greener houses of learning. Earlier this month, the superintendent

unfurled an ecological manifesto, reiterating the switchover in 135

buildings, completed last year, to what officials believe are safer

alternatives for day-in day-out cleaning.

" Boston public schools will provide and use more environmentally

friendly effective cleaning products, which will greatly help those

with asthma and allergies, " Superintendent Carol

declared.When it comes to cleaning green, schools aren't the city's

only eco-friendly outposts. It's as if environmental activists

Laurie and Sheryl Crow came to Boston and started painting

parts of the town green: from community rooms in Roxbury to kitchen

counters in JP.

" People spend about 90 percent of their time indoors, " says Tolle

Graham, a health and safety organizer for the Massachusetts

Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health, which has been at the

center of many local green-clean initiatives.

Though not as sexy as fighting acid rain, global warming, or the

desecration of rain forests, the environmental movement is turning

its attention to indoor pollution, warning of dangers that may lurk

in cleaning products used on living room furniture, in toilet bowls,

and on desktops.

" This is largely invisible to our eyes, " says Janet Domenitz,

executive director of the Massachusetts Public Interest Research

Group. " They aren't obvious, like a toxic spill where the river has

turned a different color and the banks are foaming with pollution. "

Yet advocates cite studies that allege possible links, from exposure

on the job or at home, between some cleaning-product ingredients and

fertility problems, birth defects, asthma, allergies, and other

ailments.

Figueroa, who has asthma herself, has spread her green knowledge to

her apartment at the Boston Housing Authority's South Street

development, and to others. She no longer reaches for her inhaler

when cleaning, she says, after subbing green materials for stronger

chemicals that made her nauseated as she struggled for air.

Throughout BHA developments, she's part of a healthy-homes team that

teaches residents to do things like mix one cup of white vinegar

with two gallons of water to clean floors and keep at bay the

roaches and rodents that also provoke asthma, while authority

workers use green inhibitors to ward off asthma-grating mold.

Mainstream manufacturers say their cleaning products on the

industrial and household side are safe, and that they worry that

less effective alternatives could allow formidable bacteria such as

E. coli to gain the upper hand.

Further, they take umbrage at being blamed for those studies'

findings, questioning whether the results of the testing are due to

exposure to cleaning products or to the dangerous gunk the cleaners

are trying to eliminate.

" There are scare tactics being used to . . . demonize traditional

cleaning products, but there's nothing to demonize, " says Bill

Lafield, vice president of communications for the Consumer Specialty

Products Association, which represents major cleaning-product

companies that the group says invests millions on safety

measures. " In the cleaning-product industry, people want to do the

right thing environmentally. "

Still, citing past issues, from lead in gasoline to global warming,

enviro-advocates predict that on green cleaning, too, they will soon

go from being portrayed as shrill naysayers to shrewd

prognosticators.

" It's as old as the hills, " says Domenitz. " The activists raise a

red flag early on . . . and get marginalized. "

" I'm sick of waiting, " Domenitz continues, noting a high price for

standing still, not only for coughers but coffers as well -

millions, she says, in lost productivity, missed school days, and

medical treatment.

Though it may seem like it, the thrust toward green clean hasn't

come out of the blue.

It represents an offshoot of the green building trend and an

emergent alliance between labor leaders and environmentalists

fighting so workers won't suck in dangerous fumes. It's an effort to

reduce childhood asthma, which the Boston Urban Asthma Coalition

calls the number one chronic condition treated in the city's public

schools.

It's also a nexus between personal health and planetary well-being,

as those cleaning products suspected of causing bodily harm might

also endanger bodies of water after being flushed down the drain -

another charge the industry disputes.

Enviro-advocates say that with gaps in government oversight and a

lack of full-disclosure labeling requirements for all household

cleaners, they won't disappear like stains zapped from a dining room

table.

In fact, they say they want more: passage of proposed legislation on

Beacon Hill requiring that green products be used statewide to clean

specific sites frequented by the public, from schools to hospitals.

Some who've used the alt products - from professionals ordering them

in industrial size to homemakers buying eco-friendly-marked items at

the supermarket - say the green goods are just as effective as the

mainstream brands in cost and cleaning.

Cleaning-product manufacturers oppose such a law, as does the

Massachusetts Hospital Association, which is skeptical that green

cleaners are up to the task of knocking out insidious germs.

As , the association's senior vice president of clinical

affairs, says, " You don't want your operating room to be 99 percent

clean. "

Janice Homer is a 47-year-old registered nurse in a Boston hospital

who says she developed asthma by inhaling harsh cleaning chemicals

at a previous hospital at which she she worked.

Homer is part of an illness-fighting corps that is getting sick

itself at high rates. Among the occupations tracked for work-related

asthma by the state Department of Public Health from 1993 to 2006,

nurses ranked first, accounting for 13.3 percent of confirmed cases.

After working for more than 15 years at that hospital south of

Boston, Homer says, she started feeling ill there in 2000. Her chest

tightened and lungs inflamed and sinuses swelled, she says, whenever

she passed a sink being cleaned or a floor being buffed.

Once, she says, she had to administer oxygen to herself when she

couldn't breathe and her skin turned blue.

After she shifted to a Boston hospital, she says, she no longer was

exposed to conventional buffing and spraying. Her asthma, she says,

went away.

" There are alternatives, " says Homer, who is active on the

Massachusetts Nurses Association health and safety committee and

supports the pending green clean legislation. " My example could

happen to anybody. "

If Homer's confrontation with cleaning chemicals was dire, Victor

Euceda's was more subtle. When the 36-year-old custodian spritzed

the windows at the Roxbury housing development he cares for, he

sometimes felt a tickle in his throat, or a cough slowly rise from

his chest.

But the brunt of the effect was in his head. He'd think, " Right now,

I don't feel anything " bothering him physically.

Later on, though, he fretted that he might suffer breathing

problems. What would happen to his wife and kids if he was out of

work?

" We couldn't get enough money to live, " Euceda said to himself.

His concerns were not farfetched. A study published in the Journal

of Occupational and Environmental Medicine that looked at worker

data from Massachusetts and three other states found that exposure

to cleaning products was associated with 12 percent of total asthma

cases across all jobs surveyed.

When the nonprofit community development corporation Urban Edge last

year converted to green cleaning at the complex Euceda maintains,

and at more than a dozen of its other housing sites in the city,

Euceda felt a sense of relief wash over him.

" I'm just cleaning, " the Honduran native says now. " I forget about

myself. "

Some of that green side effect fell on Tasha , too. She

lives at the new Amory Residences that Euceda keeps up.

Before the environmental alteration there, says she could

tell when Euceda had just done her hallway.

Her teenage son, , who has asthma, would bound up the

stairs like he'd just run for miles: wheezing, coughing, heaving.

Her daughter Lorraine, now 8, would start her nonstop allergy

sneezing.

Her own asthma would kick in, her lungs clamping closed.

She was dubious that the green products would really clean. But that

skepticism, she says, soon dissolved. Now, she says, her family's

breathing easier all around.

" It's better for my kids, " says , 38, who's gone uber-eco

inside her home, as well.

In the last year or so, she figures she's saved $100 from the change

to green cleaning, from fewer doctor visits to lower pharmacy co-

payments.

For her family, says, that kind of green has had other

restorative benefits, like extra trips to the movies and more Friday

night pizzas.