AQEarth West Atlanta: Addressing Community Needs
In Atlanta, Georgia, the AQEarth team includes Community Health Aligning Revitalization Resilience & Sustainability (CHARRS) and West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (WAWA), two organizations working on environmental justice and public health issues in the region. The project consists of both air monitoring and community education that collectively aim to bring community members together around air quality issues in West Atlanta neighborhoods.
Gwen Smith, CHARRS Executive Director and Founder said about the project, “Residents drive, work, live, play, and go to church in the communities in the 3-mile radius of our AQSync reference-grade monitor and may not be cognizant of the impact of the traffic, rails, and industry on air quality or the hazards to health that they present. Through this project CHARRS' hope is to collaborate with all stakeholders and connect the dots between air quality, Environmental Justice, climate change, emergency preparedness, health and well-being”.
The community education portion of the project is conducting hands-on workshops and environmental justice bus tours with stops at both industrial facilities and culturally important sites. Community stakeholders (including residents, students, and representatives from local industry, schools, and government) will learn about past and present environmental injustices, consider emergency preparedness, and participate in finding solutions to reducing future exposure risk in the project area. The first tour and community workshop took place on September 16th.
Environmental Justice Bus Tour and Workshop attendees
The team setting up the AQSync cage
AQEarth installed a high-quality stationary instrument in West Atlanta, where many industrial air pollution sources are in close proximity to residents and community. This 2BTech AQSync air quality monitor will measure NO2, NO, O3, PM, CO, CO2, and tVOC and will make real-time data accessible to residents and other stakeholders via an online platform. The instrument is being sited at Fire Station 38 through a partnership with Atlanta Fire & Rescue, and Georgia Environmental Protection Division has been assisting with a collocation of the instrument.
The team has been fortunate to connect with Dr. Christina H. Fuller at the University of Georgia College of Engineering who has supplied a black carbon monitor alongside the AQSync. This in-kind contribution expands the project’s monitoring capacity and ability to characterize the influences of sources such as rail yards and heavy-duty trucks.
A second part of the monitoring consists of community led educational monitoring with handheld sensors. Residents of all ages will record and understand local air quality in their neighborhoods using 2BTech Personal Air Monitors (PAMs).
Look out for more updates on this project!
Partners from Community Health Aligning Revitalization Resilience & Sustainability (CHARRS) work with staff from TD Enviro as part of the AQEarth project.
AQEarth is a project that aims to work collaboratively with communities to help meet their air monitoring needs, developing and implementing air monitoring systems at five different partner sites across North America: Fort Collins, Colorado; TriChapter Region of the Navajo Nation; Anchorage, Alaska; Atlanta, Georgia; and Mexico City, Mexico. It’s funded through a small business innovation research grant from the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, and is a collaboration between 2B Technologies, TD Enviro, and Montrose Environmental. Learn more at aqearth.com.
Project Partners:
Research reported on the AQEarth project is supported by the National Institute Of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R44ES024031. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
