The Deirdre Imus Environmental Health Center® Celebrating 20 Years of Protecting Children's Health and the Environment
For twenty years, The Deirdre Imus Environmental Health Center® has been dedicated to ensuring children live the healthiest lives possible – today, tomorrow, and decades from now.
My inspiration for the Center began with my work at The Imus Ranch, where my family lived, worked, and changed the lives of thousands of children with cancer.
At The Imus Ranch, we built the first working vegetarian, environmentally pristine, cattle ranch to help children who were sick, or suffering the loss of a sibling. After seeing kids thrive at the ranch, I was inspired to bring this lifestyle to another healing place: the hospital.
The Center is one of the first hospital-based programs whose mission is to identify, control and ultimately prevent toxic exposures in the environment that threaten our children's health.
Back then, it was not widely recognized that toxins in our air, food, and everyday cleaning chemicals could be making our kids and the planet sick.
We began our mission to overhaul the everyday cleaning products containing toxic chemicals used in hospitals. In the spring of 2001, we successfully implemented our award-winning Greening The Cleaning® (GTC) program. While GTC products have evolved over the years, the mission behind them remains the same: to provide cleaning products that deliver the maximum level of efficacy at the least level of toxicity.
Learn more about the People, Purpose, and Products behind our program. 100% of all profits from GTC products continue to go to the Center to support the GTC program in addition to funding education and research.
The Research Program at the Center was established to explore the intersection of human health and the environment. Since then our studies have researched everyday environmental exposures with the goal of improving public health. Learn more about our completed and ongoing studies and publications.
Over the last two decades, the Center developed award-winning sustainable programs such as waste reduction, minimizing the use of hazardous materials, preventing pollution, serving healthier foods, and more to ensure patients, team members, and visitors have the healthiest possible experience. In 2005, we helped create the first green hospital building of its size and scale in the country, which was included on the Green Guide’s list of Top 10 Green Hospitals in the U.S.
I always believed that the physical environment in a hospital should heal. I also believe to live sustainably means to consider how we can more kindly treat our planet, so that it does the same to us in return.
We hope you will continue partnering with us on this journey as we expand our mission towards healthier living and working environments for children, employees, healthcare professionals, patients, and others.