A group of about a dozen community activists, scientists, and volunteers advanced along the edge of some woods near Goldsboro last month, searching for the dense webs of the funnel weaver spider.
Ultimately, these delicate webs may reveal clues about air quality in the region.
Dani Lin Hunter, research manager for the non-profit North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, was one of the scientists of the group collecting the webs. Kneeling down to collect the web, she used a circular motion to wind one of the webs around a straw.
"You take a straw and you kind of make cotton candy with it," Hunter said. "You just want to make sure you pull it up so that the web actually comes up, and then stick it in the bag that's labeled with the sample ID, fold up the straw, zip lock it. Look for the next one."
Collecting the webs requires basic inexpensive supplies: just a paper straw and a ziplock bag. It also doesn’t require reception or Wi-Fi, which can be hard to come by in rural and low-income areas.
Wayne County is home to the H.F. Lee Power Plant, owned by Duke Energy. This facility used to burn coal before transitioning to natural gas in 2012. An adjoining facility also processes coal ash, a by-product of burning coal, by removing excess carbon to make it suitable to be used as an ingredient in cement.
In a statement to WUNC, Duke Energy said both facilities meet rigorous air and water regulations. According to Duke, every ton of coal ash recycled for use in cement prevents about one ton of greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the need to mine other natural resources for cement and concrete production.
"We are now turning a byproduct into a benefit, excavating all of the ash at H.F. Lee and putting it to good use," Duke Spokesman Bill Norton said.
But some Wayne county residents and advocates worry this process could be polluting the air in their community.
Larsene Taylor co-founded the grassroots Down East Coal Ash Environmental and Social Justice Coalition. She worries converting coal ash into concrete could be leaving communities exposed to harmful air pollutants.
"You have all kinds of health challenges, internal for the lungs, breathing in that kind of stuff, you know, lung cancer, even brain stuff," Taylor said.
Several of her fellow community organizers have passed away in recent years, and she wonders if pollution may have been a factor.
The Justice Network’s Director of Research Chris Hawn developed a project called Spidey Sens-r. Hawn adapted a technique known as spider web biomonitoring, that uses spider webs in the environment to provide information about air quality. The technique has been around since the early 1990s but has not been widely used in the U.S. Hawn has conducted similar projects in Portland, Baltimore, and now North Carolina.
"There's so many ways to measure air quality, but a lot of them are expensive," they said.
According to Hawn, government-operated air quality monitors can be costly to build, and are not always found in locations with the most air pollution. They say rural, low-income, and minority communities often have the largest burden of contamination but are not given access to air quality monitoring the way that more affluent and urban areas might be.
Hawn said the Network works to improve these disparities and support low-income communities and people of color on climate, environmental, racial, and social injustice issues.
Spider webs catch air pollutants, not just prey
Spider webs make good, low-cost air quality monitors because they’re good at collecting dust. In areas where the air is polluted, often by burning fossil fuels, dust in the air might include tiny particles of metals like lead, mercury and arsenic, according to Hawn.
"So, the dust that settles, we're able to then measure for any sort of contamination, specifically trace metals," Hawn said. "Metals in particular, are heavier than other particles, and so they can fall closer, potentially, to where they started."
The webs of the funnel weaver spider are especially good for this project because of how dense they are, and can potentially collect even more dust than other types of spider webs.
The web collection is a two-part process that starts with finding webs, and carefully clearing them without harming the spider. A group then returns a few weeks later to see if the spider has spun a new web in its place, and collects those new webs. This two-part process ensures that all of the webs sampled have been collecting dust for a standardized amount of time, and the amount of pollutants detected can be compared between samples from different areas and times.
Once they collect that second round of webs, Hawn and the other scientists with Network take them back to the lab where they boil each sample in acid to isolate the metal particles.
"And then we run it through a mass spectrometer, which can tell us the content of each metal and what kind," they said.
If enough of these metal particles make it into the air, they can cause a range of health issues for those who breathe them in, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Bringing Spidey Sens-r to communities across NC
The Spidey Sens-r project is in its early stages, but the group hopes the results of the study will tell them whether to invest in better air quality monitoring and regulations in the area.
Bobby Jones is another co-founder of the Down East Coal Ash Environmental and Social Justice Coalition. He and members of the organization were excited to partner with the Justice Network on the Spidey Sens-r project.
"A lot of this work is grassroots. We don’t have a big budget," Jones said. "But we do have spiders."
The group plans to bring the Spidey Sens-r project to communities across North Carolina concerned about air quality.
