Toxic Air Pollutants in CA Environmental Justice Zones
A collaborative air monitoring project between UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego along with various community based organizations.
Current locations with Air Quality Monitoring and Community Engagement. Points in red represent sites led by one of the UC system schools. While points in yellow are sub-projects with the 'IVAN Community' reporting network ( https://ivanonline.org/ )
California has the worst air pollution in the US. Over the last few decades, regulations have improved air quality in areas suffering the most: Los Angeles, the Imperial Valley, and the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2017, the state began focusing on disadvantaged communities through the enactment of Assembly Bill 617 (AB617): “The Community Air Protection Program.” AB617 established the nation’s first state-run community-scale program to detect air pollution hotspots in communities, helping to reduce air pollutants that tend to occur at higher levels in low-income communities of color. The development of new air pollution measurement tools to implement AB617 can be an exceptional form of relief for these communities who for years have been advocating for access to cleaner air. Disadvantaged communities in California are typically exposed to two kinds of hazardous air pollutants (HAPs): toxic metals and toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Two novel instruments developed by co-PI Tony Wexler at UC Davis, will be used by the research team with collaborative community approaches and educational outreach to build community capacity and to identify and analyze these hazardous air pollutants.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S EPA) divides air pollutants that affect human health into two categories: Criteria air pollutants that are regulated by the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS; https://www.epa.gov/criteria-air-pollutants/naaqs-table ) and acutely toxic and carcinogenic air pollutants listed as Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPS; https://www.epa.gov/haps ). The criteria pollutants are mostly emitted by vehicles and power plants. The HAPS are mainly emitted from industrial facilities. Since there are only a few criteria pollutants, instruments are readily available to measure their concentrations in the atmosphere. In contrast, there are over 180 HAPS with no cost-effective instruments currently available that can measure more than a few of them. This represents significant barriers for low-income neighborhoods and communities of color dealing with toxic air pollution problems.
The TARTA (Toxic-metal Aerosol Real Time Analysis) instrument, uses Spark Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (SIBS) to analyze metallic compounds (MCs) in the air. Parts for the TARTA instrument cost only a couple thousand dollars, so a number of them can be produced for this project at little expense. A key part of this project is to build TARTA instruments and use them to help community groups discover the toxic MCs that they are exposed to. The CF-IMS (Cross Flow Ion Mobility Spectrometer) instrument measures toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the atmosphere in real time. Air pollution, particularly near schools, can have both adverse health impacts (e.g., decreased lung functioning) and negative learning outcomes (e.g., poor academic performance) on children.
TARTA instruments will measure toxic MCs while CF-IMS will measure toxic VOCs in real time in these California environmental justice communities. The advantage of these instruments is that they report the toxic concentrations immediately so the instruments can be moved to different locations, depending on local wind patterns to track down emissions from potential sources. Another advantage of these instruments is that some sources emit during certain times of the day, say at start-up in the morning of a manufacturing facility. The time resolution of these instruments enables identification of such timing and improving identification of major emissions sources. This in turn will provide community groups with the most up-to-date data to assist with their advocacy efforts and inform regulators of important sources for remediation. Community partners will be trained by the research team on how to use these instruments. Community partners’ involvement in data collection strengthens the reach, rigor, and relevance of the research through meaningful engagement with community perspectives.
Project's Principal Investigator (PI): Clare E. B. Cannon, PhD – cebcannon@ucdavis.edu
Graduate Student Researcher (GSR): Alejandro (Alex) Sanchez – secsanchez@ucdavis.edu