A wooden rattle, a stainless steel cup, reusable wipes, soap flakes and baking soda for homemade laundry, or even an organic soap suitable for toddlers… These “pollutant-free” products should be distributed in a fabric bag to all future or new Parisian parents from mid-2025.
With these “cases”, the City of Paris wishes to “give keys” to families “to protect their child’s health on a daily basis”. Among these keys, alternatives to plastic and all the chemical pollutants that surround us.
“Every month we discover new harmful consequences that these pollutants can have on our health,” warns Anne-Claire Boux, deputy (EELV) of the mayor of Paris in charge of health-related issues, who recalls that approximately “10 % of cancers in France are linked to environmental factors. “The most vulnerable such as children or pregnant women are the most affected,” supports the elected official.
Medical advisors for prevention
The kits – delivered “without any resource conditions” – will be delivered to the city's maternal and child protection centers (PMI). Information and awareness workshops will be organized on this occasion to “give families easy and inexpensive tips”.
“Sometimes we don't think that a plastic cup can be replaced by a stainless steel cup,” explains the assistant. To accommodate the approximately 21,000 babies who are born each year in the capital with a case, the City plans a budget of one million euros per year.
A measure which is part of the town hall's second “environmental health” plan: a set of 45 actions which must be submitted to a vote in the Paris Council this Tuesday afternoon. “In 2015, a first plan had already been adopted,” recalls Anne-Claire Boux. It made it possible to identify the issues and make a diagnosis. »
This new version plans in particular to “strengthen the fight against indoor pollution in housing”. “We know that indoor air is 4 to 5 times more polluted than outdoor air, this can for example be linked to the household products used,” says the deputy. To tackle this problem, the City wants to call on “indoor environment medical advisors”, who work within the public health department of the City of Paris.
A citizen and scientific committee “to evaluate the measures”
Currently, these agents intervene in unsanitary housing, often at the request of social services. “The idea would be that they could carry out prevention actions in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods where pollution is often the greatest,” summarizes Anne-Claire Boux. Concretely, the City wishes to offer free diagnostics to residents via the trustees of private co-ownerships or through social landlords from the middle of 2025. For this, the plan plans to eventually recruit 5 new advisors to double their workforce.
Another measure: the establishment of an “environmental health guarantee” in nurseries and Parisian schools with the carrying out of measurements of air quality, lead, organic in canteens or even the evaluation of environmental quality of games. Results that the town hall promises to display in front of the establishments concerned “to make them transparent”.
So many actions on which a new committee made up of citizens and scientists will be able to comment regularly. “The idea is to keep a link with the field but also with science,” argues Anne-Claire Boux. The dozen chosen personalities should meet for the first time in the first quarter of 2025. Among them, the environmental activist Camille Étienne, the epidemiologist Rémy Slama and the former minister (EELV), Cécile Duflot.
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