What do child care cribs have to do with sustainability goals? About 40 tons worth! Due to new safety standards for cribs, GSA Child Care Centers had over 1300 cribs that could no longer be used. In support of GSA’s waste diversion goals, Regional Child Care Coordinators worked with Regional Solid Waste/Recycling Coordinators to divert over 40 tons of cribs from landfills and incinerators. Materials were either recycled or reused for creative use projects.
The Pacific Rim Region’s Success, by Nicolas Christensen
Daunting at first, when I learned about this project I saw a lot of possibilities to align with GSA agency wide environmental goals. Being in San Francisco, I was lucky to have many tools and opportunities to reuse or re-purpose the 76 cribs in our 9 child care centers. The Environmental Solid Waste and Recycling team in Central Office; Lena Kofas and Sandy Skolochenko, provided invaluable connections to recycling vendors region-wide. After some research, I found two Bay Area companies interested in acquiring some of our cribs.
The first was the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, a company built on the idea that unwanted items could be saved from the landfill and given back to the community to be reused or re-purposed, or even used for art projects and other alternatives. The director was very excited to receive 10 of our cribs to use as on-site examples of ways that items could be re-purposed into different objects than the manufacturer had originally intended. The second company was the Adventure Playground in Berkeley, CA where supervised children are allowed to work with tools to build their ideal playground. The five cribs they accepted will be incorporated into the existing playground in whatever ways the children can imagine!
The child care director in Hawaii took this project one step further by deciding to keep the six cribs at her center. Here, they were dismantled on-site and re-purposed to build such items as easels, magazine racks and gross motor equipment.
A remaining 55 cribs were transported to a local recycling vendor. One year prior to the deadline, Region 9 replaced all cribs with high quality cribs which meet the new standards, and the old cribs have been re-purposed or recycled within their local communities.
Leading the Industry
All child care centers across the nation (not only GSA centers) will also need to replace their cribs to meet the new standard. Because GSA closely followed the regulation updates, we were positioned to refresh the cribs one year before the required date. The child care division worked with crib manufacturers early and communicated our project goal to prevent the cribs going to landfills. This brought new awareness to manufacturers and many responded with similar waste-diversion strategies and recycling opportunities for the obsolete crib materials.
Recently the Y Early Childhood Program in St. Albans, VT began collecting table scraps to feed to the local pigs! Staff at the center realized that they had a lot of waste from two snack times and lunch and thought they should put that “waste” to use!
Each classroom has a bucket and when kids are done with snack and lunch, instead of throwing their garbage away, they throw all edible scraps into the pig bucket! The kids enjoy feeding the pigs, although they’re doing it remotely. The center took a picture of their scraps being fed to the pigs so the kids could see their hard work pay off! Eventually they want to take a field trip to the farm so the kids we can see their pigs. In the meantime, they will continue collecting table scraps.
A partnership of the General Services Administration (GSA), the Federal 
Aviation Administration (FAA), the FAA (DOT) Child Development Center, Inc.’s Board of Directors, and the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture marked the dedication of the newly planted garden for the FAA (DOT) Child Development Center at the FAA building in Washington, DC on Tuesday, June 7th. This project started in the summer of 2010, when Brad Twinam, the GSA Property Manager for the two FAA buildings on Independence Avenue, returned from the annual GSA Child Care Conference. At the conference, Brad heard Darren DeStefano, a GSA Horticulturist, talk about the benefits of children’s gardens. Brad asked the staff of the FAA (DOT) Child Development Center (operated by Children’s Choice Learning Center) if they were interested in starting a children’s garden. Sharleen Smith, the Director of the FAA (DOT) Child Development Center, told Brad that the American Farm Bureau, which is across the street from the center, had already been sending volunteers to do educational lessons with the preschool about planting and farming, so the garden would be a perfect extension of that educational experience.
The children plant and maintain the garden as part of their curriculum on nutrition and health. The children will do the bulk of the work in the garden, but a group of adult volunteers will help them with organizing, weeding and watering on the weekends and holidays, when the children will not be on site.
The garden consists of four planting beds, 24×2.48 feet, so there is about 192 square feet of garden. During the first year, the empha
sis will be on planting a sensory garden. There will also be a “roly poly pig” composter to teach the children valuable lessons about sustainability. The first planting day was held on March 29, and volunteers from the partners involved in the project developed several stations for the children to rotate through and actually do the planting. After the dedication of the garden on June 7th, the planting was completed, and the children participated in several stations to teach them more about composting and gardening. The children also presented the volunteers with a thank you gift that they had made and Property Management then sponsored a cookout in the garden to thank all of the federal and community volunteers for their help.
The GSA network is now 99% eco-healthy endorsed. Good work to all the providers and families. This year the eco-healthy program is expanding. Keep reading to learn more.
This fall, two leading programs to protect children’s health in child care settings are merging. Since 2005, Children’s Environmental Health Network’s (CEHN’s) Healthy Environments for Child Care Facilities and Preschools program (HECCP) and Oregon Environmental Council’s (OEC) Eco-Healthy Child Care program (EHCC) have independently protected children’s environmental health by educating child care professionals about toxic exposures and air quality issues within child care facilities. In October, the two will merge into one—the Eco-Healthy Child Care program—led by CEHN. OEC will continue to provide services to child cares in Oregon and serve as an advisor to the national program.
CEHN has been the voice for children’s environmental health in the nation’s capital since 1992, and the organization has managed its HECCP since 2004. HECCP has run in California, Georgia, Washington, DC, and Texas, and has supported over 3,000 children. HECCP is the only program in the nation that collects on-site pre and post environmental assessment data in child care facilities. Since 2005, OEC’s EHCC program has endorsed child care facilities that perform self audits and comply with 24 out of 30 best practices for environmental health. Both programs have been tremendous successes: they currently support nearly 2,000 child care providers that, together, care for nearly 65,000 children within 48 states, Canada, and Australia. EHCC has also received the EPA’s Children’s Environmental Health Excellence Award in 2006 and the 2009-2010 Childcare and School IPM Recognition Award from the IPM Institute of North America, Inc.
Merging the two prominent programs will allow for greater capacity to reach, educate and support thousands more child care professionals in preventing environmental health hazard exposure each year.
The national Eco-Healthy Child Care program is a science-based, practical initiative that trains child-care providers to create environmentally healthy facilities and offer services that will protect children from harmful toxics and air pollution—and then helps them implement changes that will help them realize this goal. When a provider commits to following the program’s best-practices techniques, which are proven to reduce children’s toxic exposure and improve indoor air quality, EHCC endorses the provider—and then promotes the endorsed facilities to parents to simultaneously reward our participants and help educate parents about environmental health issues.
EHCC’s goal is to prevent and reduce adverse health effects from exposure to pesticides, household chemicals, lead, mercury, art supplies, treated playground equipment, furniture and carpets, radon, mold and mildew, plastics and poor indoor air quality in child care facilities across the nation, and we target on-the-ground child care providers, administrators, child care trainers, and child care licensing staff.
Since its inception, EHCC has conducted targeted expansion to nine states, offering extensive training and outreach to child care professionals in California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Maine Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, and Washington. This year, the program will target six additional states, including Idaho and Vermont. EHCC intends to expand into four to six additional states a year over the next four years. The EHCC national board of advisors ensures that EHCC remains relevant to all child-care professionals as the program grows. Any child care provider in the United States can access EHCC’s free on-line resources, including the self-audit checklist and informational fact sheets, information about how to get endorsed, and a list of whoserves on our national advisory board, at www.oeconline.org/ehcc
Each classroom has a bucket and when kids are done with snack and lunch, instead of throwing their garbage away, they throw all edible scraps into the pig bucket! The kids enjoy feeding the pigs, although they’re doing it remotely. The center took a picture of their scraps being fed to the pigs so the kids could see their hard work pay off! Eventually they want to take a field trip to the farm so the kids we can see their pigs. In the meantime, they will continue collecting table scraps.
