Leveraging Spatial Measurements of VOCs to Quantify Community Exposures and Risk: Results from the Hazardous Air Pollution and Monitoring Assessment Project (HAP-MAP)

Fenceline communities frequently bear the brunt of environmental pollution, and current regulatory monitoring approaches fail to generate the data needed to document these disproportionate exposures. We addressed this critical data gap by combining state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation deployed on a mobile van and fixed site to characterize spatial concentration gradients for hazardous air pollutants (I.e. particulate matter, metals, and VOCs) in a highly industrialized regions in southeastern Pennsylvania and the Mississippi River corridor in Louisiana. We quantified the pollutant burden contributed by petrochemical and other industrial activity by comparing spatial concentrations of air pollutants measured from the mobile laboratory in the study area to the fixed site measurements (approximating “urban background”). Low-cost PM sensors were also deployed at several locations throughout the study area and were hosted by community groups involved in the study. Gradients in hazardous air pollutants were observed with higher levels, and consequently higher exposure risk, found near facility fencelines. Formaldehyde measurements varied strongly across the southeastern Pennsylvania measurement area and illustrated gradients of exposure for different locations. Mobile measurements performed in fenceline areas averaged 1ppb higher than the urban background levels observed at the fixed site. In Louisiana gradients areas with high ethylene oxide were observed by multiple spectroscopic methods, and areas with high chloroprene were observed. These observed differences in concentration and therefore exposure for a suite of hazardous air pollutants were then placed in a cumulative risk framework to show the spatial variability of risks at the neighborhood scale. This presentation will give an overview of the HAP-MAP study design and results.