Detroit’s industrial past and present mean people around the city don’t have clean air to breathe. This story is part of Exhausted in Detroit, a series copublished with Planet Detroit examining our air quality problem and what can be done.
The modern Clean Air Act, adopted more than 50 years ago, has a lot to do with Detroit’s air being much cleaner than when it was regularly enveloped by smog in the 1970s. The act required cleaner cars and less industrial pollution and the cleaner air has saved lives – about 230,000 nationwide between 1990 and 2020 according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Cleaner air also prevented 2.4 million asthma exacerbations, 135,000 hospitalizations, and thousands of lost school and work days.
But cleaner than 1970s air doesn’t mean clean.
Data collected by the American Lung Association puts metro Detroit as the 16th most polluted area in the country for year-round particle pollution. And that pollution still costs us in terms of health, productivity and lost lives.
Advocacy groups seeking to call attention to these issues have developed guidance and community plans for improving air quality in the city and region.
But they’re up against entrenched industrial interests, a pro-business political climate, a state regulatory agency that approves the vast majority of permit applications from polluters, and the limits of the Clean Air Act, according to Nicholas Leonard, attorney and executive director of the advocacy group Great Lakes Environmental Law Center (GLELC).
What’s needed to move the needle on air pollution today?
“It’s essentially policy change, and it’s at every level of government,” Leonard said. “We need to have an air permitting process more reflective of community needs and considerations, rather than just company needs and their considerations.”
The solutions to Detroit’s dirty air aren’t that complicated or surprising. Here’s what experts Planet Detroit talked to said needs to happen.
Build community awareness and organizing
Community awareness and organizing are key components of advocates’ plans for clean air solutions in Detroit and Wayne County.
“We need to shift the thinking to protect human health,” Kathryn Savoie, director of equity & environmental justice at Ecology Center, said. “How do we put that at least equal to the rights of industries that want to run their businesses and ensure that they’re doing it in a healthy way?” (Editor’s note: Ecology Center is a partner on this series.)
Increased air quality monitoring can make people more aware of unhealthy air and more motivated to do something about it. New low-cost air monitors that can measure particulate matter can make this easier for advocacy groups.
Ecology Center has convened a community air monitoring collaborative to help groups set up and track air quality in their neighborhoods. Wayne County, Dearborn and Detroit are also initiating air monitoring projects to help notify the public when air quality is poor.
Savoie calls this development a “bright spot” in the campaign to clean up Detroit’s air, noting that awareness can lead to coalitions that apply pressure and drive change — groups like Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision, Concerned Residents for South Dearborn, and the Asthma Collaborative of Detroit have been successful in raising community awareness and applying pressure to regulators.
Tighten air quality standards
A clear way to fight air pollution is to allow less of it.
The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) is responsible for implementing the Clean Air Act in Michigan. EGLE also has the authority to set more stringent air quality standards — but whether it exercises that authority ultimately depends on the political will.
In January, the EPA announced it would tighten the standard for fine particulate matter based on evidence that exposure harms human health and leads to heart attacks, asthma attacks and premature death. EPA said the more stringent standards would reduce “disparities in people from various demographic groups, including those in vulnerable and overburdened communities.”
Advocacy groups, including the American Lung Association, say the standard should be even lower; they’re calling for a reduction to 8.0 µg/m3.
According to the association, 74% of U.S. voters polled support stricter particulate matter standards. Once the EPA finalizes these standards, Wayne County will no longer meet them and will likely be required to implement measures to reduce pollution. If that happens, EGLE will likely need to place additional restrictions on existing polluters, and it could become more difficult to get new air pollution permits in the region.
Make air permitting look back
Air pollution is not uniform. Because of historical racism and redlining, certain communities, often predominantly low-income and people of color, have ended up breathing more bad air than those in more affluent and whiter communities.
More types of pollution create a “cumulative impact” that damages health. Detroit-area air quality advocates place a high priority on changing policy to prevent additional pollution in overburdened communities.
They’re pushing state and federal governments to protect these communities using complaint processes set up by these governments or pushing for new rules entirely.
In 2021, President Joe Biden issued executive orders calling on the federal government to address racial equity and the climate crisis in underserved communities, including addressing cumulative impacts. In response, the EPA said it would study the issue.
Meanwhile, some states are taking action. So far, at least 12 state legislatures are considering or have adopted cumulative impact legislation. New Jersey regulators can now reject permits for certain facilities contributing to pollution in overburdened areas. The law also puts the burden on businesses to perform cumulative impact analyses for new projects or expansions. New York and Maryland have since passed similar laws.
Advocates, including attorney Leonard, the GLELC executive director, want to see a law like that passed in Michigan. So far, attempts have gained little traction.
Legislation introduced in the Michigan Legislature in 2021 to address cumulative impacts did not make it out of committee. Without a law regulating cumulative impacts, GLELC and others have attempted to use civil rights legislation to force states to protect overburdened communities.
In 2020, the organization filed a complaint through EGLE’s nondiscrimination grievance process, alleging that an air emissions permit it issued to the company US Ecology in Detroit in January represented a “pattern of neglect and disregard for communities of color in regards to the licensing of commercial hazardous waste facilities.”
And in 2021, it submitted another complaint, this time to the EPA, alleging that EGLE violated the agency’s obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin for programs receiving federal assistance, when it granted an air emissions permit to FCA (now Stellantis) on Detroit’s east side.
Leonard isn’t optimistic the federal government will take action after a similar complaint in Flint over an asphalt plant failed to produce an agreement that included any finding of wrongdoing on EGLE’s part.
The Flint agreement followed the EPA’s dismissal of several civil rights investigations into chemical plants in Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” which Leonard said shows the limits of how much the federal agency is willing to consider civil rights in environmental cases.
Michigan state regulators say they look to the EPA for direction on these issues.
“In cases like these, we continue to look to EPA to see what, if anything, they do in terms of providing additional guidance or rule changes to assist air programs across the nation,” said EGLE spokesperson Hugh McDiarmid.
Leonard wants the state to rely more on actual monitoring data and less on computer models that estimate and predict pollution in permit decisions impacting overburdened communities. He pointed to an ongoing case in Detroit in which a permit applicant is relying on an upwind pollution monitor 6 miles away, ignoring a closer one that had higher readings for particulate matter.
He also said the state could do more to protect public health under its existing authority, pointing to a rule permitting EGLE to use its discretion to set more restrictive requirements for air toxics than required by law on a case-by-case basis.
“In certain situations, maybe you’re going to deny a permit or require the company to do some mitigation project,” he said. “It’s recentering the permitting process around the community and protecting that community.”
Reduce emissions and exposure to mobile sources
Cars and trucks add a lot of pollution to the air. Burning gasoline and diesel in cars and trucks releases particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, benzene and formaldehyde into the air and the greenhouse gases that drive climate change.
A 2022 study found “moderate to high evidence” of a causal relationship between motor vehicle pollution and acute lower respiratory infections in children, lung cancer mortality in adults, and asthma onset in children and adults.
There are plenty of ways to reduce the emissions of car and truck-related air pollution, experts say, including cutting down on the amount of driving in an area (also known as reducing “vehicle miles traveled” or VMT) through encouraging transit and multimodal transportation, retrofitting diesel engines with filters and newer equipment to reduce emissions, and using alternative fuels that emit less pollution than gasoline and diesel. Electrification of internal combustion engines will also cut down on air pollution.
To cut down on exposure to car and truck-related air pollution, state and local authorities could require vegetative buffers, barriers and setbacks between highways and places where people live, work and go to school and restrict truck idling and routing in or near places where people live, work and attend school. Detroit has an idling ordinance, but advocates say it’s not well-enforced.
Meanwhile, advocates have called for a truck route ordinance to restrict heavy truck traffic in residential neighborhoods.
Other measures include installing air filtration in buildings near freeways and high-traffic areas, such as the one installed at Mark Twain Elementary in Southwest Detroit, as part of a consent agreement with Marathon.
Editor’s Note: This series is funded through a civic science and journalism collaboration grant through the Rita Allen Foundation with support from the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Journalism organizations Planet Detroit and Outlier Media and civic science organization Ecology Center partnered to produce the stories for this project. Planet Detroit and Outlier Media made all editorial decisions independently of Ecology Center, which provided technical expertise and guidance.
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