Growing up in Memphis’s Riverside community, a majority-Black neighborhood that’s also home to an oil refinery, LaTricea Adams, the founder and president of Black Millennials 4 Flint, saw firsthand how damaging soot and other forms of pollution can be.
“I suffered from severe sinus infections, which later transitioned to life-long chronic asthma,” she said on a press call. “Both my grandmother and great-grandmother suffer from chronic asthma.” Her father also died of a heart attack when he was only in his 60s.
So the new, tighter standards on soot pollution that the Environmental Protection Agency announced on Wednesday are, as she put it, personal for her.
No type of pollution is worse for public health than soot. While the name may have a bit of an old-timey ring to it, recalling fireplaces and chimney sweeps, soot is produced by a variety of sources, from cars to coal plants to wildfires. The teeny tiny bits of carbon — the more technical name is fine particulate matter — are so small, just a fraction of the size of a grain of sand, that they are easily inhaled. And when they are, soot particles can wreak havoc on the respiratory system: exposure to fine particulate matter is linked with asthma and lung disease, as well as a host of other health problems, including heart attacks and even Parkinson’s.
Having cleaner air overall has not solved the disparities in who is exposed to soot the most.
But as is so often the case with environmental issues, it’s Black and brown Americans who have the most to gain from an overall reduction in soot pollution. People of color have higher levels of exposure than white Americans, no matter their class position. And Black people, in particular, have nearly 1.5 times greater exposure to soot than the average American.
Anyone old enough to remember the jet-black clouds that used to come off of buses or billow from semi-truck exhaust pipes can fairly guess that there is less soot in the air today than 20 or 30 years ago. But, having cleaner air overall has not solved the disparities in who is exposed to soot the most.
To that end, the EPA is also changing how soot is monitored so that more data is gathered from high-risk communities. “This will advance environmental justice by ensuring localized data collection in overburdened areas to inform future NAAQS [National Ambient Air Quality Standards] reviews,” according to a release from the EPA.
The new standard is 9 micrograms per cubic foot of soot pollution, down from 12 micrograms. But a lower 8 microgram standard had been suggested by the EPA’s own scientific advisory committee. The standard was only tightened for the annual maximum amount of soot allowable, while the 24-hour limit will remain the same.
According to a report from the American Lung Association, far more people — 63 million compared to 21 million — live in communities that surpass the daily soot threshold compared to the old annual soot limit of 12 micrograms.
Still, the estimates from the EPA of what the new standards will achieve for public health are significant. According to the agency, they will prevent “up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays, yielding up to $46 billion in net health benefits in 2032.”
