Enrique Navarro starts his workday when most people are winding theirs down, when pesky rats raid backyard fruit trees and the savory smell of dinner wafts out of houses. Monday through Friday, he hops on a bright orange Metro bus near his home in Echo Park and takes it to an office building in downtown Los Angeles, a short 15-minute ride away, to clock in at 6 p.m.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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Navarro has spent most of his adult life cleaning bathrooms, emptying and sorting trash, and otherwise making office environments immaculate during the night hours. Yet it wasn’t until last year that the 59-year-old Mexican-born janitor encountered an employer who was just as concerned as he was about the larger impact—on both his own health and that of the ecosystem—of the products he uses and disposes of in his job.
In 2020, Navarro began work at a building with a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) platinum rating, a designation that is conferred on only the greenest of structures. Navarro is responsible for sorting trash on 52 floors of offices in the building. More than most, he has a strong visual sense of the enormity of the waste such large commercial spaces generate and the critical need to reduce it.
“We have no idea how much trash a building produces,” Navarro says in Spanish. “I estimate there are probably 1,000 trash bags dumped per week. If they were all piled up on top of each other, it would make a mountain.”
Also in 2020, Navarro completed the Green Janitor Education Program (GJEP), a 30-hour accredited course that teaches janitors about energy efficiency, recycling, waste management, water conservation, and green cleaning products. GJEP is a joint effort by several powerhouse organizations from the labor, environmental, and real estate sectors. On the labor side, there’s Building Skills Partnership (BSP), an L.A.-based nonprofit that offers low-wage California workers access to workforce development, immigration services, and community resources, as well as the Service Employees International Union–United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW). On the environmental side, there’s the U.S. Green Building Council–Los Angeles (USGBC-LA), a regional nonprofit that is focused on education and community engagement and is related to the larger nonprofit that sets LEED criteria and verifies compliance. Lastly, there’s the Building Owners and Managers Association of Greater Los Angeles. The course is free and taught in Spanish. Upon completion, janitors receive $125, a certificate, and a pin. Their building scores a LEED point, which places it in the certified, silver, gold, or platinum category.
In the SEIU-USWW’s Southern California headquarters in downtown L.A. one recent afternoon, Navarro, dressed in a navy-blue polo shirt, jeans, and sturdy black leather shoes, talks about some of his biggest takeaways from the program. Chief among them is the ability to inspect the labels of cleaning agents for harmful ingredients and have access to environmentally friendly substitutes. “As janitors, we work with so many different types of chemicals, and some are really strong,” says Navarro, who now also uses green cleaning products at home and is more conscious about saving water and energy. “The green ones aren’t as irritating to our eyes, hands, and lungs. We can breathe easier.”
In some cases, the use of toxic cleaning agents has proved fatal. This past Mother’s Day, Bertha Montes died of complications from COPD and thyroid disease five weeks after her manager at an East L.A. McDonald’s forced her to work despite the fact that she was sick. When you have a suppressed immune system, being exposed to harsh cleaning products without proper ventilation can be dangerous, according to the American Lung Association.
Potential exposure to toxic chemicals and the pressure to work while sick are just two of the health hazards janitors have faced for decades. Navarro, for his part, manages on average only five hours of sleep. He’s disciplined himself to eat one large meal a day at 3:30 p.m. to keep his digestive system on track. Navarro is one of an estimated 25,000 janitors in California represented by the SEIU-USWW, whose parent organization, the SEIU, is the largest union of property services workers in the country and one that helped janitors earn a living wage, health insurance, and respect for the invisible labor they do. On Saturdays, Navarro cleans his own home; on Sundays, he volunteers at a grocery co-op in Pico-Union.
“Janitors were really praised as essential workers at the beginning of the pandemic,” says Karen Aragon, BSP’s community advancement director, who has a master’s in public health and encourages janitors to sleep as much as they can in the morning when they get home from a shift. “They were the ones keeping it safe for the rest of the world. Disinfecting is a huge responsibility. There was a lot of anxiety.”
BSP executive director Luis Sandoval sees a correlation between today’s movement for better protection of janitors’ health and the National Farm Workers Association fight against toxic pesticides in the 1960s, which directly improved the lives of his father and grandparents, who all worked the fields. Sandoval experienced the challenges many SEIU workers face as a janitor in Salinas in the 1990s.
“Janitors are the eyes and ears of a building,” says Sandoval over Zoom. He’s sitting in his home office, among photos of his grandfather working in an artichoke field and holding an iconic red United Farm Workers flag. “As buildings are becoming more green, we want to make sure janitors are at the forefront of the sustainability conversation and apply what they learn at home.”
A study conducted by Seed Consulting Group, which does pro bono work for environmental nonprofits, found that GJEP buildings saw a 76 percent decrease in energy and water usage and used 5.6 percent less energy on average compared with non-GJEP buildings. In addition, 80 percent of the program’s participants ended up implementing green practices at home.
“Buildings account for 40 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions,” says Ben Stapleton, executive director of the USGBC-LA. “People don’t talk about buildings enough. We talk about cars, electric vehicles. If we’re going to hit our climate goals, we need to reduce the impact buildings have on the environment.”
Stapleton says the push to remove natural gas stoves, water heaters, and dryers, which create harmful fumes, is a start. There are laws being passed for more transparency in building materials, and a movement is afoot to create more environmental product declarations, or EPDs, which are like nutrition labels for building supplies, enabling potential buyers to see what’s in their glass or drywall. Earlier this year, Stapleton posted a picture on LinkedIn of him in front of a mural that USGBC-LA unveiled in Boyle Heights. Artists had used environmentally friendly, nontoxic paint that captures harmful pollutants, thereby purifying the air. They called it a “smog-eating mural.” Imagine if all buildings were painted with that material. We all could breathe a little easier. •
Kamren Curiel is a fourth-generation Chicana born in East L.A. and raised in Monterey Park and South San Gabriel. She’s written for the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Taco, LAist, KCET, Huffington Post, and Latina magazine and was the L.A. editor at Remezcla and a senior online editor at Sí TV.
