Reduce Your Chemical Footprint Workshops

Attention: Currently, IES is not offering workshops. Please check back on this page periodically for updates.

Help Keep Your Water Clean and Protect Your Health!

IES has developed educational and interactive workshops for adults and children. Workshops give participants the knowledge necessary to help protect themselves and their family’s health, our drinking water, and the environment from harmful contaminants. Many harmful contaminants found in personal care and household products that we encounter in our everyday lives are not removed during the water treatment process.

Workshop Curriculum

1. Non-Toxic Cleaning and Living

Learn techniques to clean your home while avoiding chemicals that contaminate the environment and drinking water.

2. How to clean up your beauty routine

Learn how to make your own natural beauty products in this hands-on workshop, and find out which commonly used chemicals in some products could be contaminating the water supply.

3. How to make your own safe and natural products

Many chemicals that appear in baby products and in cleaning products can harm you, your child and the environment. Learn how to make your own personal care and household cleaning products that are free of these chemicals, and find out how to avoid these chemicals in products you buy.

4. Avoiding chemicals when grocery shopping

Come learn which chemical contaminants may be in the food you buy. Learn smarter ways to shop and easy tips to make the most of your money and time.

Past Workshops

2020 Fort Logan Northgate School Workshop, Sheridan, CO (virtual)

The Reduce Your Chemical Footprint pilot virtual workshop was presented by eight IES Chemical Footprint (CFP) Project team members to seventeen 7th and 8th grade students in the Leadership Class at Fort Logan Northgate School (FLN) in Sheridan, Colorado. The 55-minute workshop consisted of three virtual presentations on contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), ways to limit human and environmental exposure, a do-it-yourself (DIY) product making activity, and a label reading activity.

2020 Sustainable Eiber Virtual Workshop – Pilot Project

The pilot workshop consisted of an informative presentation about chemical footprints and contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), an open discussion section, and activities such as product label reading and do-it-yourself product making. The virtual workshop addressed the barriers of sustainable change and offered participants the necessary tools to overcome these barriers. IES’s first virtual workshop received positive feedback from the participants.

2019 South Platte River Urban Waters Partnership Workshop

IES presented to members of the South Platte River Urban Waters Partnership (SPRUWP) on November 19, 2019 about reducing chemical footprints and preventing water pollution to improve human and environmental health. Following the presentation, the IES conducted a Reduce Your Chemical Footprint workshop with the participants. This workshop enabled the participants to make their own contaminant-free personal care and household products. SPRUWP includes regulatory professionals, environmental advocacy representatives, and community stakeholders that work to protect the quality of the South Platte River. IES made valuable connections and received insightful feedback from dedicated professionals striving to protect an important source of drinking water.

2019 Ocean First Workshop

Ocean First Dive Shop in Boulder hosted IES’s “All Water Leads to the Sea” presentation and interactive workshop that explained the issue of chemical footprints and demonstrated how to reduce them on May 9. It was a remarkable event accompanied by drinks and tasty snacks for members of the local community! The IES Chemical Footprint Team talked with Boulder residents about how the products used in their daily lives leave a chemical footprint that is found in the water of the South Platte River on its downstream journey to the sea. We illustrated the local water cycle, with its path of melted snowpack from the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico. In addition, participants learned how contaminants such as oxybenzone, BPA, alkylphenols, triclosan, parabens, and synthetic fragrances are not adequately treated at wastewater or drinking water treatment plants and enter the water cycle, harming human and environmental health.

2019 Clean Water Initiative Workshop at Red Rocks Community College

The Chemical Footprint Project team hosted the Communities for Clean Water Initiative pilot workshop at Red Rocks Community College Lakewood Campus on April 18, 2019. IES team members presented the harm posed to human and environmental health from exposure to contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) found in common personal care and household products, while providing strategies on how to avoid them. Workshop participants enjoyed making their own affordable, safe, and effective household products such as all-purpose cleaner, body scrub, hand sanitizer, and bug repellent. Everyone participated in activities to learn how easy it is to avoid and reduce CEC exposure. Immediately after the workshop, participants committed to IES’s 30-Day Challenge to reduce household and family exposure to contaminants. Participants reported that the 30-Day Challenge, product label reading activities, and demonstrations on product scanning phone apps like Think Dirty and Environmental Working Group’s Healthy Living were valuable tools that participants planned to use to reduce their chemical footprints.