ABSTRACT
In the fall of 2003, the Boston Urban Asthma Coalition (BUAC) and the
Massachusetts Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH)
launched the Green Cleaners Project, a coalition of organizations, including
labor unions and school administrators, to address well-documented problems of
environmental quality in Boston schools. Coalition participants wanted to ensure
that discussions about environmental health problems in Boston schools and
their remediation would include the broadest possible array of stakeholders,
including parents, teachers and other school employees, school administrators,
and community health advocates. Despite the expensive and capital-intensive
nature of solutions to many of the environmental health problems documented
in the schools, the coalition quickly won a major victory on one component of
its short-term agenda: the replacement of common cleaning products with less
toxic “green” alternatives.
