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 About Us > Issues Background
Our Issues
The Precautionary Principle
Grassroots Community Organizing
School Sitting
Green Cleaning
Human Testing
Indoor Air Quality
Safer Pest Control
The Precautionary Principle
At the heart of the CPOC is a precautionary approach, which states that the prevention of harm should be taken at every opportunity to protect the health of children. The campaign operates under the BE SAFE Platform, which promotes the Precautionary Principle. In the 21st century, we envision a world in which our food, water and air are clean, and our children grow up healthy and thrive. Everyone needs a protected, safe community and workplace, and natural environment to enjoy. We can make this world vision a reality through prevention, safety, responsibility and democracy.
Our goal is to create a society where pollution, environmental destruction and harmful chemical exposures are prevented from happening in the first place.
Grassroots Community Organizing
For over 25 years, CHEJ's experienced organizing staff has helped thousands of community groups form, grow and win child-protective victories at the local level and beyond. We provide personal assistance over the phone, in person, and over the Internet, to help individuals form groups, define their goals, and develop a plan of action. CHEJ empowers groups by providing them with the tools they need to organize and win.
Here some of the ways we can assist you:
- Providing the information you need to better understand technical chemical exposure issues.
- Provide scientists to review technical documents and speak to you on the phone or via the Internet.
- Teaching you to organize in your neighborhood and form an effective community group that can stand up with a united voice.
- Work with your group to develop strategies to stop polluters in your community.
- Develop effective ways to involve more people or make your group stronger.
- Work with your group on finding the most strategic ways to hold accountable those people responsible for environmental problems in your community.
- Help empower your group to gain the tools you need to research, negotiate and win.
- Giving you the hope, encouragement, and the knowledge to win environmental victories that bring about long term change in your community.
Whether it's switching your school to green cleaning products, or ensuring public participation in major decisions impacting children's environmental health, we can help you organize to achieve your goals. Read more about CHEJ's Organizing Assistance, or contact us to start organizing today.
School Siting
Due to population increases, decreases in available public lands, scarcity of funds for school districts in addition to a number of more local issues, there is an increasing trend of schools being sited on lands contaminated with hazardous substances. Because children are required to spend nearly one-third of their daily lives in school buildings at an age when their bodies are more vulnerable to environmental toxins, we must take action to ensure that school environments are healthy places to work and learn. CPOC has released a series of reports documenting this trend. Topics include children's special vulnerabilities to environmental toxins, a 50-state survey of school siting laws, and model school siting guidelines that communities can use to create local policy.
Green Cleaning
Chemicals in traditional cleaning products can cause serious health problems in children, including, neurological disorders, learning disabilities, and reproductive disorders.
Green cleaning has been defined as "products and services that reduce the health and environmental impacts compared to similar products and services used for the same purpose" (The Ashkin Group, LLC.). New research shows that green cleaning greatly reduces impacts to health and the environment, can save institutions money, and contributes to increased student productivity and reduced absenteeism in schools.
Given this new information, schools across the country are now using green cleaning products. Green cleaners are readily available, cost-competitive, and as effective as traditional cleaning products, and can be used in schools, homes, federal buildings, hotels, and wherever cleaners are used.
Human Testing
Children are not guinea pigs. Where products or chemicals cannot be proven safe for human use or consumption, we should err on the side of precaution, not test pregnant women and children, the most vulnerable populations, to measure effects. Read more information and news about the human testing debate.
Indoor Air Quality
Air pollution is not limited to the outdoors. In fact, the quality of the air we breathe indoors is often worse than outdoor air. Indoor air pollutants such as mildew, dust, mold, diesel bus exhaust fumes, or toxic cleaners or pesticides can cause asthma, headaches, rashes, and sometimes more serious illnesses. By taking steps to identify and eliminate potential and existing hazards, indoor air pollution can be reduced.
Safer Pest Control
Pesticides and herbicides kill bothersome insects, rodents and weeds, but scientists have found that they are harmful to humans as well, especially children. Despite the abundance of research documenting the health risks associated with pesticide use, these chemicals continue to be used in close proximity to children.
The effects of prolonged exposure to pesticides include neurological and reproductive damage and cancer. Immediate health effects include eye and throat irritation, skin rashes, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, flu-like symptoms, upper respiratory distress, and, in extreme cases, death.
Children's behavioral tendencies greatly increase their risk of inhaling, swallowing, touching, or otherwise coming into contact with pesticide residues.
Moreover, in most states, these chemicals are being applied without any notification to parents. Most states do not even require that signs be posted when pesticides are used in schools or on school grounds.
CPOC advocates for pest control using Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. IPM is a strategy aimed at preventing pest problems by using pest control methods that do not pose health risks to people. Under IPM, pesticides (which include herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, rodent poisons, and miticides) are applied only as a last resort and only the least-toxic products are used.
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