Focus on cities will boost benefits of air pollution action for most vulnerable
Meeting UK air pollution targets by focussing on urban areas will maximise health benefits for the most deprived communities.
A study led by Imperial College London researchers shows that reducing typically urban sources of fine-particle air pollution like roads, wood burners, and machinery would also reduce inequalities in how different communities suffer the health impacts.
Air pollution can reach the lungs, causing short-term irritation and more harmful long-term impacts on heart and lung function. For people with existing conditions like heart failure and asthma, this can worsen already serious health problems.
Residents or workers in more deprived areas are more likely to suffer these conditions, and as such are disproportionately impacted by air pollution.
The new study shows that while there are many ways to reduce the UK population’s exposure to air pollution overall, focusing on these typically urban sources benefits deprived areas more, reducing the health inequalities across the country. The research is published in Environmental Advances.
Lead researcher Dr Huw Woodward, from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, said: “People facing higher air pollution in deprived areas suffer health inequalities, which have a profound impact on their quality of life. Reducing air pollution will benefit everyone, but thinking more deeply about how we get there can also help us alleviate the impact on the most vulnerable in society.”
Reducing bias
There are several types of air pollution, including nitrous dioxide and fine particles. This study focused on a type of fine-particle pollution called PM2.5 (pollution particles that are less than 2.5 microns across).
The UK Environment Act of 2021 set a target for cutting the population’s exposure to PM2.5 by 35% by 2040, compared to 2018 levels. In practice, this means reducing the sources of the pollution, which include industry, road transport, energy production and agriculture.
Experts and policymakers use models to explore different ways of reaching the target by reducing pollution from these sources by different proportions. While all reductions in pollutant emissions will reduce the population’s exposure, previous studies have not considered how different ways of reaching the target would influence the health inequality.
To track how different scenarios impact the inequality, the team created a new metric, called the Indicator of Exposure Bias (IoEB). They paired this with the UK Integrated Assessment Model, used to investigate the impact of future emissions scenarios on air quality in England.
The team modelled several of these scenarios, including two that meet the 2040 target, and used the IoEB to assess their impact on the exposure bias. The ‘successful’ scenarios both achieved the target by reducing PM2.5 sources from all sectors, but one focused more on urban sources, including road transport and wood burners.
While both these scenarios reduced the exposure bias, the one focusing more on urban sources had a larger impact, reduced the bias by 59% (compared to 43% for the other scenario).
North-South divide
There is also a bias between Southern and Northern areas of England, with the former experiencing higher levels of PM2.5 air pollution. This bias is due to the south receiving a greater proportion of pollution from shipping channels and continental neighbours. The south of England has fewer deprived areas than the north, and as such this north-south divide in PM2.5 from non-UK sources reduces the overall bias towards deprived areas.
Despite this, deprived areas still experience higher levels of PM2.5 pollution. Of the sources under English control, the bias towards deprived areas is greater than that assessed by considering all sources including those from outside of the UK.
The study looked at pollution on the level of populations, as individual exposure is very difficult to estimate accurately.
The team believe their new measure can be applied to different countries or regions using models that estimates population exposure and socio-economic status. This could allow policymakers to identify the sectors which contribute disproportionately to the bias in exposure and to identify effective strategies for reducing this bias.
JOURNAL
Environmental Advances
ARTICLE TITLE
Assessing PM2.5 exposure bias towards deprived areas in England using a new indicator
Novel mobile air monitoring technology yields greater insight into post-disaster pollution levels
Study was the first to apply the method to a real-world disaster—a major industrial fire in Indiana
TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY
A team including researchers from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health and School of Medicine has found that high resolution mass spectrometry could be a valuable tool for identifying and assessing air-borne contaminants produced by natural and man-made disasters. Their findings were published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology.
The scientists used high resolution mass spectrometry—a highly accurate means of identifying molecular compounds in a sample—in fall 2023 to identify volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present following a major fire that occurred on April 11, 2023, in Richmond, Indiana. The fire and subsequent explosions at the My Way plastic recycling plant led to the evacuation of residents in a half-mile radius from the facility. The fire was sufficiently large to be captured in satellite images, and debris was found as far away as Oxford, Ohio, nearly 30 miles from the site.
“The Environmental Protection Agency does extensive, long-term recovery work after disasters like this,” said researcher Natalie Johnson, PhD, from the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health. “We believe that our study proves this method produces accurate data very quickly, which could help officials determine the best evacuation zones following a disaster.”
The research was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Others on the team were Eva C.M. Vitucci, PhD, a postdoctoral student in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Carolyn L. Cannon, MD, PhD, from the Texas A&M School of Medicine and two colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University.
The team monitored the air within and bordering the half-mile evacuation zone using high resolution mass spectrometry and non-targeted analysis, a relatively new computational tool for detecting and identifying chemicals in environmental exposures.
Johnson said this approach is an improvement over the ones currently used in the field, which frequently have issues with instrument sensitivity, time limitations in sampling and ability to characterize a broad range of pollutants. Non-targeted analysis, on the other hand, quickly and effectively identifies all the compounds—even those not known to be present initially. While this approach has shown promise in previous tests, this was the first time it was applied to a real-world disaster.
After receiving training and guidance on the Hzard Comparison Module by Antony Williams of US-EPA’s Center for Computational Toxicology and Exposure, the team used the module to create a risk assessment from the VOCs present. Their analysis identified 46 VOCs, and the average levels in the area studied were higher than those they found in Middleton, Ohio, about 520 miles away.
The levels of hydrogen cyanide—which disrupts the body’s use of oxygen and can cause death—and four other VOCs were at least 1.8-fold higher near the incidence site. Of the 46 VOCs, approximately 45 percent were classified as high hazards, and 39 percent were classified as very high hazards.
“Each of the VOC levels we detected were individually below the hazard thresholds for single exposures, but we currently do not fully understand what the hazard thresholds would be for exposure to VOC mixtures such as these,” Johnson said.
She noted that facilities such as My Way contain large amounts of harmful toxins, and a large number of different toxins, which makes prediction of the VOCs produced in fires and similar disasters difficult.
“Fires at recycling plants and other typically smaller-scale disasters are usually overlooked as contributors to pollution levels, but they also are happening more frequently across the United States,” Johnson said. “This makes research and the application of research findings a pressing public health issue.”
JOURNAL
Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Observational study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
The application of PTR-MS and non-targeted analysis to characterize VOCs emitted from a plastic recycling facility fire
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