LEAS Wins CCME Award

Alberta Environment Minister Lorne Taylor presented the award to LEAS executive director Mae Burrows and LEAS researcher Sean Griffin at a special ceremony held in conjunction with the annual Pollution Prevention Roundtable. It was one of seven awards presented to small, medium and large businesses, institutions and organizations.

LEAS was honoured in the organization category for its innovative Cleaners, Toxins and the Ecosystem project work.

Two years ago, LEAS began working with workplace health and safety committees to identify toxic cleaning products on a number of institutional and industrial worksites and to replace them with safer, environmentally preferable products. The ongoing project has seen thousands of litres of toxic products eliminated from the waste stream. LEAS holds regular workshops to demonstrate the effectiveness of the project and has also begun working with household consumer products.

In accepting the award, Burrows said the "real thanks have to go to the people on the worksites, the health and safety committees who took part in this project.

"We’re really pleased with this award, especially because it validates the unique work we’ve done in pollution prevention," she said. "We’ve been able to get people involved in pollution prevention right at the workplace level and helped protect their health and safety by reducing exposure to toxic chemicals."

Other award winners this year included the City of Toronto for its acclaimed sewer use bylaw and Mountain Equipment Co-op, which won an Innovations award for its zero solid waste, low-emission headquarters building in Winnipeg.

The Pollution Prevention Roundtable brings together representatives of industry government and non-profit organizations around a variety of pollution prevention issues and initiatives. This year’s event, the sixth annual, was sponsored by CCME, Environment Canada, the Calgary Foundation and the Canadian Centre for Pollution Prevention.

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