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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.
Detroit has some of the dirtiest air in the country. We know this thanks to a huge amount of air quality data. So much, in fact, that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had to use a loophole earlier this year to throw out some of this data to avoid pollution restrictions, including a car emissions inspection requirement.
Federal regulators signed off on the Whitmer’s administration approach in late May, just as the summer’s first plume of wildfire smoke from Canada drove an unprecedented wave of public interest in air quality and fueled calls for even more data.
Will more data make a difference? Even environmental advocates who build their public campaigns on statistical evidence are asking. After all, the unhealthy amount of air pollution in the Detroit area is hardly a secret.
Air quality in the city has improved in recent decades as government officials track and limit pollution under the authority of the federal Clean Air Act.
But Detroiters are still breathing harmful pollution, and clean air advocates said they can’t wait another 20 years for major air quality improvements. They cautioned that better data won’t do anything to achieve that goal unless it’s backed by community organizing.
What the data says now
“What good is the data if you’re not going to hold companies accountable?” said Samra’a Luqman, an environmental activist and board member of Concerned Residents for South Dearborn, a neighborhood association.
Luqman lives on the Dearborn-Detroit border. Her neighborhood has some of the most hazardous air quality in the state and country, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Health hazards from air pollution are concentrated in Detroit-area neighborhoods like hers, ones that abut major industrial operations.
Especially in these neighborhoods, Detroiters live with more air pollution than residents of almost any big city in the country. Wayne County, which contains Detroit, received an F for air quality from the American Lung Association in this year’s State of the Air report.
Luqman said her son, Deen, had a large tumor in his mouth removed when he was an infant. He also developed asthma and was diagnosed with high blood lead levels.
“You already have data, you know there is an environmental health impact to communities, you know that these companies are continuing to pollute. So what are you doing with that information?”
Samra’a Luqman, environmental activist and board member of Concerned Residents for South Dearborn
Those health problems, she believes, were the result of industrial pollution. It’s rarely possible to prove a single cause of a cancer diagnosis, but people in Michigan do die from air pollution-related cancer, heart problems and respiratory illnesses at higher rates than the national average.
The same pollution that hurts Detroiters’ health also drives climate change, which poses serious threats to life and property. For instance, the steel industry, a major polluter in Detroit and a key link in the automotive supply chain, is responsible for an estimated 9% of carbon emissions across the entire globe.
What more data could do
Deen’s school, Salina Elementary, is in some ways a poster child for the power air quality data can have. A municipal power plant and a steel mill sit just across the street. An array of high-end air gauges that test the air for pollutants sits near the playground.
The air monitors look like large metal birdhouses and are part of Michigan’s federally mandated pollution monitoring network.
In 2015, data from this station helped build a case that the steel mill across the street had repeatedly violated the Clean Air Act. As part of a settlement, the company agreed to install an air filtration system at Salina Elementary, to help ensure that students would breathe clean air while they learned indoors.
The Clean Air Act’s system of data collection and pollution limits is largely responsible for adding 1.4 years to American lifespans since 1970, according to one estimate.
“The rules do work,” said Mark Mitchell, a manager in the air quality division of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE).
“You used to have auto plants that had no (air quality) controls on them,” Mitchell said. “Now most of the auto plants are completely controlled.”
The state is using federal funds granted during the COVID-19 pandemic to add a new monitoring station on the eastside of Detroit near a US Ecology hazardous waste facility that has repeatedly violated air pollution rules. Residents of the area hope this new data source will encourage regulators to do more to limit that pollution.
Meanwhile, Wayne County is investing $2.7 million in a three-year plan to install 100 sensors on lightposts beginning in 2024 and distribute hundreds of additional sensors to residents. Residents can sign up for updates from JustAir, the company contracted to manage the sensor network.
Data from the new sensors doesn’t meet federal quality standards and can’t be used to enforce the Clean Air Act. Still, many environmental advocates and residents are glad to have a more granular local picture of air quality “hotspots.” That could allow individuals to make better decisions for their health.
The City of Dearborn is installing similar air sensors and equipping them with lights designed to give residents a rough sense of whether the air is likely to exacerbate symptoms of asthma. Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said at a community event in November that a green light indicates clean air, yellow means “use caution,” hazardous air triggers a red light.
Theresa Landrum, an environmental activist in southwest Detroit, said additional air quality data “might help us in future arguments.”
What more data won’t do
Luqman warned that air quality data, like any tool, is only as good as its user. Numbers can be twisted, misused and ignored — and the state has a history of doing all three, she and other activists said.
At worst, official efforts to collect more air data can distract from the work of actually making the air safe to breathe.
Residents of a majority-Black neighborhood near Flint filed a civil rights complaint last year saying the state discriminated against them by allowing Ajax Paving to open a new asphalt plant in their neighborhood. EGLE and the EPA settled the complaint by offering to show up to public meetings and provide the community with an air quality sensor, among other measures.
Andrew Bashi, an attorney for the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center who worked on the case, said the data doesn’t make up for putting a new industrial facility in a community already facing more than its share of pollution.
“It allowed the state to offer something without doing anything that gets to the root cause of the problem,” he said. “They’re using air monitoring as a pawn.”
Hugh McDiarmid, an EGLE spokesperson, said the department took “unprecedented” measures, up to the limits of its legal authority to gather public feedback and limit emissions from the Ajax facility.
In other cases, officials have discarded data that showed high levels of pollution. Facing stricter business permitting rules and an unpopular auto emissions testing requirement, the Whitmer administration argued that the federal government should just discard data from the most polluted days in 2022, saying the pollution was mostly caused by wildfire smoke, not industry. Outside experts said the effect of wildfire smoke on ozone pollution was unclear.
The episode showed that air quality data “is like the bible,” Landrum said. “People interpret it to fit their agenda.”
A Whitmer spokesperson referred questions to EGLE.
McDiarmid objected to the notion that the data was “discarded” through a “loophole,” saying the state simply followed federal rules for handling “exceptional events” like wildfire smoke.
The Clean Air Act system of measuring the air to enforce pollution limits may help protect communities, but the process can be slow.
In 2015, when the steel plant was forced to pay for air filtration inside Salina Elementary as part of a federal consent agreement, it promised to take steps to reduce emissions.
The pollution didn’t stop.
Instead the plant racked up dozens of air quality violations in the following years. Then last month, federal officials announced another consent agreement with the current owner, Cleveland-Cliffs. The company will pay a fine, install a new device to reduce air pollution from its facility, and spend $244,000 to provide air purifiers to nearby residents.
Luqman applauds those steps, but she still views the episode as a failure to protect residents. State data had shown the company was violating pollution rules for eight years before the company was forced to change its ways. During that period, her neighbors, son and mother developed serious health problems.
‘Pressure… from residents’: An essential ingredient for cleaner air
Luqman emphasized that air quality improvements tend to be driven by community members.
Michiganders fought for the Clean Air Act. Now that the state meets most air pollution standards laid out in the law, citizens are pushing federal officials to tighten those standards.
Without stricter emissions limits, expanding Michigan’s air monitoring efforts “won’t do anything,” Landrum said. In October, she attended a press conference where Detroit-based clean air advocates made the case for stricter federal pollution controls.
Local governments, such as Wayne County, are trying to get in on the act. Officials plan to “leverage that data to hold (polluters) accountable,” Dr. Abdul Al-Sayed, Wayne County health director, said in a statement when the plan was announced.
Luqman worries, though, that even though local officials already have access to decades of local pollution data, they don’t have a track record of improving air quality.
“You already have data, you know there is an environmental health impact to communities, you know that these companies are continuing to pollute,” she said. “So what are you doing with that information?”
Wayne County did not respond to repeated questions about how they would actually hold polluters accountable.
The county should learn from residents, Luqman said, noting that the state didn’t begin to push for another consent decree at Cleveland-Cliffs until residents threatened to sue. “It was only after pressure came from residents.”
McDiarmid, the EGLE spokesperson, disputes this. He said there’s “no reason to believe that the threat of a lawsuit affected the consent decree update process.”
Luqman thinks differently. The latest settlement is “a testament to everyone (from the neighborhood) coming to town halls, calling EGLE every time they see” pollution from the Cleveland-Cliffs facility, she said. “This is really a testament to the community’s work and advocacy.”
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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