East Boston

Pursuing new approaches to democratizing air quality data and mitigating pollutants in a near-airport community.

Context

The near-airport community of East Boston has a long history of advocacy, most notably the heroic efforts of the Maverick Street Mothers to block heavy truck traffic from through their neighborhood during airport expansion in the 1960s. Stakeholder interviews in East Boston identified accessibility of consistent and exposure-relevant data as a significant barrier to harnessing East Boston's advocacy energy for air quality EJ. Surprisingly, no routine air quality measurements exist in the vicinity of Logan Airport. The closest DEP-operated air quality monitoring site is in Boston's North End neighborhood, intended to capture the impacts of commuter rail emissions at North Station and traffic on I-93/MA-1A. 

We learned from stakeholders that this dearth of air quality measurements had two main consequences. First, the absence of any measurements has allowed Massport (the operator of Logan airport) to continually claim that the airport had very little impact on air quality in the surrounding areas. By making data available to the public in real time, Air Partners pulled back the veil on Logan's near-field impact, increasing transparency between Massport and the surrounding communities. Our partners expected this increased transparency to have cascading impacts, strengthening the position of advocacy groups and elected officials to push for air quality mitigation funded through a polluter (Massport)-pays model.

Second, a lack of real-time air quality data prevents nearby residents from adjusting their personal outdoor activity to reduce their own exposure. Air Partners had the opportunity to equip residents with this crucial information. Our partners expected that this increased air agency among residents would have additional benefits of increasing the communal sense of self-efficacy and combating a pervasive feeling of disempowerment about the polluted air that they breathe.

The traditional paradigm of air quality monitoring is ill-equipped to address these problems. Because the initial cost of traditional EPA air monitoring stations is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and because they must be maintained by air quality experts with terminal degrees, relatively few of these sites exist, even in polluted urban areas. For example, there are only four sites operating in the entire Boston metro area. 

An additional challenge to the traditional air monitoring paradigm is that pollutant plumes -- particularly plumes in close proximity to sources -- vary substantially in both space and time. For example, most pollutant concentrations decline to background levels within 300 m of the edge of major roadways. Data from initial Air Partners studies of landing aircraft at a site near Logan Airport suggest that aircraft plumes have lifetimes of two minutes or less and can be clearly tied to individual aircraft. When considering human exposure to air pollutants, true exposure-relevant data must therefore be highly time resolved (2 min resolution or better), highly spatially resolved, and publicly available in real time.

Finally, if communities are to most effectively leverage air quality data for advocacy, they must control the data themselves, not rely on a third party. While data from DEP sites are available to the public, data access is obscure and published data are provided at 1 hour time resolution -- far too coarse a timescale to capture the impact of short-duration plumes on exposure.

In response to these challenges, we worked with community partners in East Boston to envision and prototype a new paradigm of air monitoring defined by community-owned networks of highly spatially resolved, low-cost air sensors reporting data in real time at 1 min resolution. Our first collaborative effort in East Boston was to develop new technology, supporting this new paradigm of exposure-relevant, community-owned air quality monitoring.

Air Quality Technology Development

While there are low-cost sensors on the market, as well as tools aimed at visualizing air quality data in a more accessible ways (e.g. sensor.community), the democratized air monitoring paradigm envisioned by our community partners necessitated the development of new technology to create an integrated ecosystem for seamless connection between real-time data from custom sensor hardware, back-end software, and front-end data visualization tools.

To support this vision, an Air Partners student team partnered with local air quality instrument experts at Aerodyne Research and QuantAQ to develop a novel, self-contained and low-cost multi-pollutant air sensor that could be deployed both at stationary sites and as a mobile sensor on buses, taxis and even bikeshare bicycles to improve the spatial distribution of measurements. The Modulair instrument developed by the Air Partners student team is unique in its self-contained, battery-powered operation, ability to push data in real time over cellular networks, and its combination of both gas- and particle-phase data that, when combined, allow for source identification of pollutant plumes. A version of Modulair serves as the core sensing technology for a pilot community-owned air monitoring network described below.

Having developed sensor hardware appropriate for community-owned, exposure-relevant air monitoring, the Air Partners team worked with stakeholders on a project centered on the key motivating question of:

What front-end and back-end software ecosystem will be necessary to support data streaming from networks consisting of hundreds of lower-cost, community-owned sensors, and then to democratize those data in real time to benefit residents and advocacy groups?

Through a stakeholder-centered design process, a student team then proposed and developed the software architecture outlined below. Key features include the capacity to incorporate: data from ever-expanding networks of hundreds to thousands of stationary and mobile sensors, reference-grade data from scientific equipment deployed in mobile air quality labs, cloud-based machine learning (ML) sensor calibration algorithms that continually learn and improve, a database accessible via API, and finally a scientist-focused webapp for accessing data. The software designs developed by this Air Partners student team were integrated into the core data product for our partners at air quality data startup QuantAQ.

Pilot Air Monitoring Network

Because the efficacy of the software system could be demonstrated only through testing and validation with data from real sensors, the Air Partners team worked with advocacy group AIRInc to establish a fully community-owned air quality monitoring network, utilizing the low-cost sensor model developed by the group. The Air Partners group also created a mobile laboratory with reference-grade instruments that can be deployed in collocated fashion at sites with lower-cost ARISense/QuantAQ sensors to validate their data and improve ML calibration algorithms. 

The pilot community-owned air quality monitoring network of 6 sensors has been operating since July of 2019, and grew to 12 sensors across the North Suffolk Communities of East Boston, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop in 2020-2021. Using data from the network, we have demonstrated an ability to determine the spatial and temporal contributions of known and suspected pollutant sources to overall exposures in the community, as well as pollutant profiles for different source types. While the impact of Logan Airport is clear across near-source sites, the spatially-distributed nature of the network has allowed us to identify significant source contribution from roadways, tunnel exits, industrial sites, and the Port of Boston. Further, the high temporal resolution of measurements has enabled plume-by-plume analysis of pollutant impact near sources. Insights from the data have supported the Air Partners mission of democratizing air data, identifying priority areas for HEPA mitigation, and supporting data-driven advocacy and policy goals with community stakeholders.

Mitigating Exposure

One of the guiding principles of Air Partners is that highlighting and quantifying the problem of air pollution in our stakeholder communities must be balanced by improving access to strategies for residents to reduce their exposure to pollutants. Without accessible methods for actually addressing the problem, community partners indicated that we may inadvertently exacerbate the existing culture of disempowered fear surrounding air pollution within the community. This section describes the Air Partners process of proposing, testing, and piloting approaches to reducing pollutant exposure in East Boston --- ultimately aimed at developing a sustainable and effective paradigm for achieving reduction in pollutant exposures.

Americans spend, on average, 87% of their time indoors, as indicated by The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS), and evidence from Air Partners' and collaborators' work in East Boston suggests that over 70% of outdoor pollutants infiltrate the indoor environment. This means that there is the compelling need to reduce our stakeholders' overall air pollutant exposure by removing indoor air pollutants, ensuring the cleanest possible air where they spend most of their time. 

HEPA air filtration -- either through high-efficiency filters employed in HVAC systems or through stand-alone HEPA air purifiers -- is widely employed to provide clean indoor air, and was raised by community partners as a possible pathway to better air health in our stakeholder communities. However, when Air Partners student teams began researching their efficacy at removing UFPs from the air, they found a near-complete lack of data. They similarly found no data on the real-world efficacy of HEPA purifiers in near-source environments resembling our stakeholder communities. HEPA air purifiers are rated for removing particles larger than 300 nm, but their efficacy at removing particles in the UFP size range (< 100 nm) has not been rigorously studied. Further, while data on HEPA purifier efficacy are generally reported as % removal of particles after a single pass through the filter medium, mathematical models to predict pollutant concentrations indoors require a rate of particle removal. Given these gaps in the data, it was necessary for the Air Partners team to design and conduct an original scientific study to determine whether HEPA purifiers remove UFPs quickly enough in the near-airport environment for us to propose them as the cornerstone of a mitigation approach with advocacy groups and elected officials. 

By measuring particle size distribution with a scanning electrical mobility spectrometer (SEMS) continuously during the operation of commercially-available, stand-alone HEPA air purifiers in a polluted room, we were able to characterize the devices' efficacy and particle removal rate. This work confirmed that stand-alone HEPA air purifiers are effective at removing particles across the size range from 5-1000 nm, and particle removal rates are high enough to mitigate the influence of new particles infiltrating from the outdoor environment. These particle removal rates were used to build a mathematical model to predict the indoor concentration of particles of different sizes, given a range of ambient concentrations and assumptions about particle infiltration rate. The model is used regularly by Air Partners and epidemiological researchers to guide decisions about the number of purifiers necessary to reduce particle exposure in a particular classroom or residence. 

Equipped with these results, Air Partners worked with community partners to design and execute pilot studies aimed at demonstrating the efficacy of stand-alone HEPA air purifiers in real-world applications in residences and classrooms in East Boston. Working closely with partner residents and schools, we designed an experimental protocol for collecting before and after data on HEPA air purifier efficacy: 1) identify a test site (residence/classroom), 2) model expected particle removal efficiency, 3) deploy particle sensors for one week to gather baseline data on indoor/outdoor particle concentration ratios, 4) install a HEPA purifier (or multiple purifiers, depending on model results from step 2), and 5) continue to take particle measurements for one week under filtration. These before and after data sets allowed us to quantify the percent reduction in pollutant concentrations achieved with HEPA purifiers, giving us evidence for their real-world efficacy.

Initial testing in 10 classrooms and 5 residences suggested that operating a HEPA purifier reduced the total indoor concentration of particles by 72-82%, given ideal device operation. Leveraging initial pilot results, Air Partners teamed with the East Boston Social Centers, AIRInc, and Mothers Out Front East Boston to propose a scaled-up HEPA purifier pilot via a grant opportunity through the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBS) Healthy Living Accelerator Grant Program. The goal was to transform our evidence-based proof of concept for HEPA-driven indoor air quality mitigation into an implementable and scalable plan for providing free HEPA air purifiers to every classroom and residence in near-airport environments in Massachusetts. Work on the grant is ongoing, and has resulted in the deployment of over 300 HEPA purifiers in classrooms, municipal buildings, and residences across the North Suffolk communities, with air sensing targeting a subset of 10% of those deployments. Results suggest that across a wide range of deployment scenarios and user behaviors, HEPA purifiers achieve a 45-94% reduction in exposure to particulate matter for particle sizes ranging from UFPs to PM1, PM2.5, and PM10 (average 54%). 

Results from HEPA pilot work have been presented to a wide variety of stakeholder groups, including students, teachers, and parents from partner schools; community advocacy groups aiming to increase HEPA purifier usage and availability; school system superintendents; leaders of community health centers; and the elected and appointed officials who ultimately develop the policies that codify mitigation approaches. HEPA pilot results are a key feature of the policy and advocacy work.

Policy and Advocacy

As outlined in How We Work, the Air Partners paradigm for achieving impact through partnerships and community-driven research recognizes that the traditional paradigm for environmental impact through research and legislation can be slow to achieve impact in at-risk communities. However, the traditional system remains crucial for enacting widespread environmental benefit through policy. Further, the nimble, community-level effects that characterize the Air Partners projects described throughout this paper still require financial and legislative support at the city and state levels in order to be officially adopted as mitigation strategies, sustained in the long term, and replicated in other communities throughout the country. Legislative pathways therefore remain a strong undercurrent in Air Partners work.

Since the founding of Air Partners, we have consistently shared our results with and sought the input of elected officials at the city, state, and federal levels, and have recently begun to leverage our findings and deep understanding of the near-airport context to co-author legislation to safeguard air for our stakeholders' communities. These efforts have three main goals:

1. Circumventing delays in the traditional research-to-law system

2. Creating pathways for our community-level, direct action work (such as deploying community-owned monitoring networks and HEPA purifiers) to be officially adopted and funded as a mitigation strategy near Logan airport

3. Sharing our model and results more broadly, so that other communities can replicate and contextualize our approach

Ansell and Gash (2007) define collaborative governance structures as situations when public institutions engage [with] non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented, and deliberative”. Our work, originating from the community, in partnership with academia, has attempted to build mechanisms where government can learn and integrate findings and procedures into how it takes action. Enabling community-led projects such as this one to inform and transform government decision-making is not a straightforward endeavor. Here we describe two key efforts that serve as examples of Air Partners' approach to collaborative governance.

Bill Authorship

Our deepest and most productive relationship in the policy space has been with Massachusetts Representative Adrian Madaro, a native East Bostonian who represents the First Suffolk District (which includes his hometown neighborhood). Since meeting Rep. Madaro in 2018, he has contributed substantially to our understanding of the East Boston air quality context and the relationship between the neighborhood, Massport, and the legislative system that connects them. 

During 2020-2021, an Air Partners student team collaborated with Rep. Madaro to write a bill titled: ``An Act improving air quality in airport environmental justice communities" (S.496). Our process for writing the bill began with stakeholder engagement through Zoom meetings aimed at assessing the key priorities for air quality legislation from advocacy groups, social service providers, healthcare providers, air quality experts, and elected officials. Through a series of meetings, consensus was reached about the key pillars of a bill that would address needs surrounding expanded air monitoring and mitigation efforts, as well as understanding more clearly the connections between airport pollutant exposure and human health. 

With these pillars identified as key high-level goals, the Air Partners team engaged in a process of research aided by literature, interviews, and field work to develop a specific policy recommendation to support each pillar. These recommendations were presented to stakeholders, whose feedback was incorporated into a final policy recommendation that became Bill S.496. The bill calls for: 1) expanded air monitoring to provide exposure-relevant data across near-airport communities, 2) monitoring of ultrafine particles, or UFPs, at all Massachusetts DEP sites and a subset of newly-established, near-airport sites, 3) an epidemiological study of health outcomes for residents of near-airport communities, and 4) provisions for HEPA air purifiers in every classroom within a 2 mile radius of airports.

After the bill was filed, the Air Partners team developed a set of materials that Rep. Madaro's and Sen. Boncore's teams can use to advocate for the bill in committee and in testimony. These materials include a scripted slide deck, a one-page summary of the bill, and a FAQ document that may serve as a reference sheet when answering questions about its provisions and implementation. The Air Partners team will provide expert testimony when the bill is argued during the current legislative session.