Highways like the Durham Freeway and I-885 have helped Downtown Durham flourish, bringing more people into the city than ever before. But in the summer, these roadways also bring dangerous heat and air pollutants into neighboring communities.
Bonita Green is the executive director of the Merrick Moore Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit that advocates for the neighborhood. She is also a member of CleanAIRE NC’s Air Keeper program.
For Green and her neighborhood, air quality concerns persist even when there isn’t smoke in the sky.
“I grew up with asthma,” Green said. “That developed into a lung disease. Having the ability to breathe is very important because I've had those moments where I've struggled to breathe.”
Green also thinks about the older people in her neighborhood, the same elders who helped raise her. Some now suffer from heart disease, diabetes, emphysema, and other illnesses that leave them vulnerable to air pollution.
Green’s neighborhood, and many other historically Black communities, shoulder the burden of low air quality due to traffic-related emissions, according to a recent study from UNC-Chapel Hill.
Sarav Arunachalam is a professor and deputy director at UNC’s Institute for the Environment. He and his team modeled exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) — two common traffic pollutants — at a community level.
“Nitrogen dioxide is a colorless gas,” Arunachalam said. “You can’t see it in the atmosphere.”
Fine particulate matter consists of dust particles that are incredibly small. Arunachalam compared them to human hair; these particles are about 24 times smaller than a single hair.
These particulates are dangerous in part because of their size. Our bodies can’t filter out these microscopic invaders, so they enter our lungs and bloodstream. Arunachalam and his team fed U.S. census data into their model to see how these emissions impact different communities at the census block level.
“We saw that census blocks, which have historically minority populations, tend to have more exposure than the white majorities,” Arunachalam said.
The model found that traffic-related air pollution exposes minority communities across the United States to “up to 15% more PM2.5 and up to 35% more NO2 than white communities.”
Poor air quality exacerbates four out of the five leading causes of death in North Carolina. Still, Kirsten Minor, the health program manager for the advocacy group CleanAIRE NC, said doctors don’t always consider these important environmental factors when treating patients.
“A doctor can write a prescription, and a patient can comply and take their medications," Minor explained. "But if the patient lives in a community that is overburdened by air pollution and other sources of pollution, that's not a personal risk behavior determinant. That's an environmental determinant.”
Moving forward, Green said community leadership will need to take the reins in addressing urban heat, air pollution, and the consequences of the city’s past segregationist policies.
“The community voice has to not only be centered,” said Green. “It has to lead in the process.”
The Merrick Moore Community Development Corporation has already started several initiatives aimed at improving overall environmental health, such as planting a community garden and food forest, and protecting the green spaces the neighborhood has left.