Healthy Child Care Program
Introduction
Welcome to the New Brunswick Lung Association’s Healthy Child Care Program! It is funded by the ecoACTION program of Environment Canada and the New Brunswick Departments of Health and Social Development. We hope that you find this Action Kit to be useful in helping you to have the healthiest indoor and outdoor environment possible for your child care facility.
As you can see from the sections in this Action Kit, there are many components of a healthy environment. Although the New Brunswick Lung Association is primarily concerned with air quality because it affects respiratory health, the Lung Association recognizes that everything in the environment is interconnected. For example, the more we reduce our energy, water and material consumption, the less pollution from production, pumping, and manufacturing goes into the air. However, conserving water and limited resources is also valuable for reasons other than the protection of air quality.
Most people realize that outdoor air pollution is bad for our health. However, because of what we use inside our buildings, indoor air can often be 2-5 times more polluted that outdoor air, and occasionally more than 100 times worse, according to research done by the American Environmental Protection Agency.
The Action Kit provides background information about how to improve air quality directly, both indoors and out, conserve energy and water, reduce solid waste, improve your green space, and assess your facility. There are some hands-on learning activities included and also some prompts and examples of handouts that you can use to help put ideas into action. For those materials of which you need one per parent, please call us at the New Brunswick Lung Association: 506-455-8961, or 1-866-454-5864 (lung), or e-mail info@nb.lung.ca to order more.
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