Ten questions concerning air fresheners and indoor built environments

Air fresheners are pervasive within indoor built environments, such as workplaces, schools, housing, transportation, hotels, hospitals, care facilities, and a range of private and public buildings. Air fresheners are designed to impart an aroma to the air environment or to mask odors, with the intent of creating a pleasing indoor space. However, despite the intent, air fresheners can emit and generate a range of potentially hazardous air pollutants that can impair air quality. Even so-called green and organic air fresheners can emit hazardous air pollutants. Air freshener ingredients are largely unknown and undisclosed, owing to regulatory protections on consumer product ingredients and on fragrance formulations. In studies, fewer than ten percent of all volatile ingredients are typically disclosed on air freshener labels or material safety data sheets. From an indoor air quality perspective, air fresheners have been indicated as a primary source of volatile organic compounds within buildings. From a health perspective, air fresheners have been associated with adverse effects, such as migraine headaches, asthma attacks, mucosal symptoms, infant illness, and breathing difficulties. This article investigates the seeming paradox that products designed to improve the indoor environment can pose unintended and unknown risks. It examines the science, health, and policy perspectives, and provides recommendations and research directions

Helping Low-Income Families Manage Childhood Asthma: Solutions for Healthcare & Beyond

Asthma is the most common childhood chronic illness, affecting more than seven million children nationwide. Managing chronic illness in a child is challenging for any family. Among the challenges is constant fear of an acute episode, a complex regimen of medications given daily or many times each day, frequent changes in prescriptions or dosages, coordinating multiple healthcare providers, and helping a child have as "normal" and active a childhood as his/her condition allows. Low-income children of color bear a heavier asthma burden than their white or more affluent peers. Those low-income children who live in urban areas such as Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York are particularly vulnerable. Families with limited resources struggle to provide their children with asthma the support that these children need

Bridging the Equity Gap: Driving Community Health Outcomes Through the Green Jobs Movement

The fundamental link between poverty and health mandates a new approach to both, one capable of raising community health standards by lifting individuals, families and communities out of poverty.Merely providing access to healthcare does not address fundamental societal inequities that translate into greater health risks and more extensive exposure to environmental hazards for low-income communities and communities of color -- risks aggravated by climate change.In Bridging the Equity Gap: Driving Community Health Outcomes Through the Green Jobs Movement, Green For All makes the case that the Green Jobs Movement -- a broad, progressive coalition of environmental and health advocates, social justice and civil rights organizations, labor and community-based groups, and business -- can bring about a systems change to improve economic, environmental and health conditions for low-income communities

Accurate Economics to Protect Endangered Species and their Critical Habitats

Federal agencies currently use a methodology that finds negligible benefits of protecting critical habitat for endangered species, despite the prime real estate that is often involved. The Endangered Species Act already calls for economic analysis, but agencies currently treat it as a meaningless hoop to jump through. Agencies justify this hollow exercise by pointing to the difficulty in quantifying the increment of added protection that comes with critical habitat designation. However, the increment of added protection for critical habitat can be measured using methods already employed by agencies in other environmental analyses. Although the central benefits of critical habitat are improvements to the condition of listed species, accurate economic analysis should also consider the broad benefits of ecosystem services that flow from protected areas to human populations. I propose that agencies use a methodology that weighs the estimated burdens on regulated parties against the estimated benefits of designating lands as critical habitat. My proposed—more accurate—analysis can lead to more effective implementation of the Endangered Species Act by allowing agencies to target limited resources to projects that offer high net conservation benefits. I use a recent cost-benefit analysis for loggerhead turtles to demonstrate that the benefits of conserving habitat include increased protection of the species as well as a larger flow of ecosystem services amounting to at least $106 million per year in benefits, not the$0 estimate that federal agencies have arrived at. Accurate economic analysis provides useful information to agencies and the public in a way that can improve discussions that are often one-sided because of an emphasis on regulatory costs with little discussion of regulatory benefits

House Bills 3620 and 3621, by Representative Isaac, Erode Water Quality and Open Space Protections in the Hill Country

The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Environmental Human Rights in New York’s Constitution

There is an environmental case to be made in favor of convening a Constitutional Convention. On the 200th anniversary birth of Henry David Thoreau, we can remember his admonition: “Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” What has this to do with the Constitution

Education, labor rights, and incentives : contract teacher cases in the indian courts

Since the liberalization of India's economy beginning in the early 1990's, the government has increasingly employed contract workers to perform various state functions, including in the education sector. Yet, little research has been done to examine how courts have reacted to this shift in government labor policy. This paper looks at all reported cases involving contract teachers in the Indian Supreme Court and four High Courts over the last thirty years. It finds that although almost never explicitly overturning precedent, the judiciary in India has increasingly become less sympathetic to contract teachers demands, particularly at the Supreme Court level. The paper then argues that the Court could use its power of judicial review to engage the government in a dialogue, not unlike some of its earlier decisions in the 1980s and early 1990s. The Court can help guide the government to create a labor policy that not only achieve better results for students, but better working conditions for teachers. Such a dialogic approach could potentially be adopted to help reframe the government’s contract labor policy more generally.Tertiary Education,Primary Education,Education For All,Teaching and Learning,Access&Equity in Basic Education