Deirdre Imus

What was your eco-awakening, or the point when you first became interested in greening your own life?

It goes back to my childhood. I remember wearing a dress made from the plastic tabs of 6-pack Coke bottles. But at the point, I didn't really understand the impact. Seven years ago when we started the Greening the Cleaning program at the Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology at Hackensack University Medical Center, people didn't know what 'green' meant. When you see statistics like one out of every six kids lives in poverty, one of every six has a neuro-developmental disorder, one out of every eight babies is born premature, when 46 children a day are diagnosed with cancer and you have asthma as a leading chronic illness, you have to wonder what's happening. Especially since these numbers have increased substantially over the past 20-25 years and research has shown that a good 80% or more of these illnesses are from environmental toxins from the products we are exposed to everyday.

Through your work at the Imus Ranch and with The Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology, you work very directly with trying to make life better for kids with cancer, as well as implementing practices that will make their lives healthier. How has this impacted the way that you're raising your own son—or what do you hope he learns by experiencing these situations through and with you?

We all need to be practicing what we're educating, because otherwise it's phony. We make adjustments to how we live everyday, and we acknowledge the reality of the world we're living in, but I'm trying to teach by example. Our son will be 10 in July and he's grown up this way. He's constantly asking questions about the food we eat and about his school. One day he told me that his school smells and that he was feeling nauseous. I found out that they were using chlorine bleach and ammonia to clean the floors, which he hasn't been exposed since we don't use them at home. Since then, we've implemented the Greening the Cleaning program in his school.

Speaking of schools, one of your newest initiatives is helping schools go green. What are some of the reasons that you've decided to devote your resources to schools specifically?

Bottom line: Our kids spend 80% of their time in schools. We launched the Greening the Schools campaign about a month ago, going around the country implementing the program by speaking and educating schools about how to incorporate green habits like recycling. Since most schools renovate when they shut down for the summer, we're teaching them about nontoxic, no VOC paint, nontoxic cleaning products and pest control. And we're showing them how to do this affordably because we know their budgets are tight. We implemented the program at the Hackensack University Medical Center in response to the realization that there was no better way to prove that nontoxic cleaning solutions work as well, if not better than their conventional counterparts, than by doing it on a large scale in the highly scrutinized environment of a hospital. It's been incredibly effective and cost competitive. We've been able to yield a savings of about 15% just by implementing these greener products.Your second book in the Green This! series, Growing Up Green, is about to be released.

Can you tell us a little bit about what we'll find in the book?

I say the book is for anyone with a child from in utero to university. We're essentially giving very comprehensive tools for raising a child in the healthiest way possible in an increasingly toxic environment. I go month-by-month, year-by-year during the growth of the child in terms of what the potential exposures are and what the parents should be conscious of. Some have said it's like the Dr. Spock of the 21st century. And it's knowledge that your mainstream pediatrician isn't qualified to give you, like how to choose a healthy baby bottle, or how to vaccinate your child safely.

Throughout the book, there are interviews with leading doctors and scientists, like Dr. Oz and Dr. Larry Rosen. For parents who want to be more eco-aware in their daily life, but don't know where to start, what are three things that you would recommend they start with?

Starting with the home environment: Change your cleaning products and pest control, which are major contributors to allergies, skin rashes, concentration problems and asthma because a lot of them contain hormone disrupters and neurotoxins. My first book Greening Your Cleaning goes into detail on how to do it. And then look at the food you're eating. Make a list of the foods your family and your kids eat in abundance and make them a priority. Every kid eats a few apples a week and they can be loaded with pesticides, so buy organic apples. If your family eats a lot of cereals, make sure you buy ones with whole grains that don't contain dyes. If you are using a lot of dairy milk, make sure it's organic. If cost is an issue, just make one change for now until you can afford to make the other changes. Even one small change can make a huge improvement to your family's health.

Do you have any green products, whether beauty, home or food related, that you can't live without?