Minneapolis will deploy air pollution monitors with grant from Biden administration

The Environmental Protection Agency will funnel more than $50 million into expanding air monitoring in communities struggling with pollution, including about $411,000 for Minneapolis.

The city will use the money to expand an existing air-monitoring program and focus on its green zones, where residents have faced the combination of environmental pollution and racial segregation.

In all, money will fund 132 projects proposed across the country, including 19 in states bordering the Mississippi River. Officials and advocates said building out community monitoring will help give residents a clearer picture of what's in the air they breathe.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said this week that the move advances the Biden administration's commitment to invest in areas that have suffered decades of environmental injustice.

Research has shown that low-income, Black, Brown and Indigenous communities are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards, including toxic air. Communities along the Mississippi River – from New Orleans to Memphis to Wood River, I.ll – host hotspots for pollution. Drawn to the availability of water and easy navigation, manufacturing plants dot areas along the length of the river's banks.

"Empowering our communities to gather quality data about the air they breathe will help ensure dozens of overburdened communities have the tools they need to better understand the air-quality challenges in their neighborhoods, and will protect people from the dangers posed by air pollution," Regan said.

In Minneapolis, the city is installing about 100 sensors to measure tiny lung-damaging particulate matter and toxic gases, said Jennifer Lansing, a senior environmental research analyst with the city's Department of Health. The sensors have been placed in neighborhoods where residents showed concern about the air, and some of the results can be viewed in real time on the PurpleAir website.

"We've been working with the community from the beginning to develop a plan for community air monitoring," Lansing said.

With the new EPA funding, Minneapolis will be able to add 30 specialized canisters to sample air, and then analyze those samples in a lab, looking for volatile organic compounds, Lansing said.

Those compounds are a large class of vapors that can irritate the eyes, nose or throat and in more serious cases can damage the liver, kidneys and nervous system, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Minneapolis has previously grappled with pollution from industry, most notably from Northern Metal Recycling, a facility on the Mississippi that the state found had altered its air emissions records. It moved its metal shredding from north Minneapolis to Becker in 2019 but continued to run a junkyard in the city until an industrial storage company bought the land this year.

In its grant application, the city wrote that it receives "daily complaints" about odors and possible pollution from several industrial sites, including "a metal recycling facility, two asphalt shingle producers, an asphalt surface producer, a foundry, a metal finisher, a printer, industrial cleaning facilities, a garbage incinerator, and energy production."

About $20 million of the EPA grants will come from the 2021 American Rescue Plan, and another $32 million was allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act passed in August, according to Regan.

The only other grant awarded in this round in Minnesota totals $67,500 for the Red Lake Nation, north of Bemidji. Tribal officials will buy an air monitor and test for ground-level ozone in an effort to help fill a gap in the MPCA's monitoring network, said Jennifer Malinski, an environmental specialist with the band. Ozone is an irritant to the young, old and those with respiratory conditions like asthma, according to the American Lung Association.

"Part of why we have never monitored [for ozone] is because it's expensive to get started, and it's prohibitive," Malinski said.

For some parts of the country, the funding has been a long time coming.

After years of fighting against pollution from a nearby industrial plant, Robert Taylor, an advocate and resident in St. John the Baptist Parish in south Louisiana, welcomed the influx of money to improve local air monitoring. His parish will benefit from a $498,000 community air-monitoring program led by a New Orleans-based nonprofit, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice.

"There is before us now the opportunity to alleviate some of the long-term problems we have, that we have struggled against without any kind of positive reaction from any government agency," Taylor said Wednesday.

In Reserve, La., Taylor and his neighbors have called for Denka Performance Elastomers, a neoprene manufacturing plant, to lower its emissions of chloroprene, a likely carcinogen, since 2016. The plant, in coordination with the state Department of Environmental Quality, has lowered its emissions, but not enough to reduce residents' exposure to levels considered acceptable by the EPA.

Two Louisiana state agencies are under a federal investigation by the EPA over whether the failure to lower emissions and inform residents of the chemical's health risk violate federal law. After going so long without results, Taylor said residents are reinvigorated.

"The onslaught of this chemical industry and its resulting devastation in terms of our health was being ignored, and the people here now do have hope," Taylor said.

Including Taylor's community, about $8 million worth of projects were funded in states bordering the Mississippi River.

The money for community air monitoring marks the agency's first grants funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, Regan said. Money to continue the air-monitoring programs would need to come from another source, he added.

"As we continue to move forward and look at new opportunities down the road, it will depend on which community is capable of applying for what grants in the future that will determine where they get future resources," Regan said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, funded by the Walton Family Foundation.