Jack Luskin, senior associate director of TURI, discusses toxic household products with a group of City Year members. With him is Anne Chalupka, research assistant in TURI.

Jack Luskin and Anne Chalupka of the Toxics Use Reduction Institute recently trained about 120 City Year Boston Corps members in March about toxics in household products.

The service members, aged 17 to 24, learned through a morning of classroom and hands-on training about how to read labels, identify harmful ingredients, and make their own safer cleaning products.

People sometimes assume that safer or “green” products don’t work as well as commercial products.  The City Year Corps members challenged this theory by cleaning windows and hard surfaces with cleaning solutions made of safe, inexpensive ingredients like baking soda and vinegar.  The comparison proved that the safer solutions worked and they had fun in the process.

City Year Corps members spend a year working as tutors, mentors, and role models for urban youth.  The training about toxic chemicals in products will be integrated into their communication with communities to further spread the word about the importance of using safer alternatives at home.

City Year members discover that “green” products work as well as commercial products in cleaning windows and hard surfaces.