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Published in Summer 2003
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'Mothers' fight air pollution with buckets
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By Philip Fine
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A neighborhood group in Houston is using an
innovative way to monitor and fight local air pollution: buckets.
"When you have a burned-out street light, you know who to call. The same goes for fixing a hole in the road or a trash problem," said Linda Block, a former field director for Mothers for Clean Air (MfCA). "But how do you deal with a problem like air pollution?"
Rather than trying to explain the properties of a chemical or offer a course on jurisdictional politics, MfCA simply asked people to follow their nose and collect samples of foul-smelling air.
Ordinary citizens, dubbed the "Bucket Brigade," gathered the samples using an apparatus that consisted of a stainless-steel bucket with a plastic bag inside it, powered by a small vacuum. The bag acted like a set of lungs, breathing in the chemicals in the air, which would stay trapped and were later brought into
a laboratory for testing.
The neighborhood they chose to test, southeast Houston, is located along part of the Houston Ship Channel, where many petrochemical plants are found. The community of 30,000 is exposed to three million pounds of toxic pollutants released each year from four industrial plants, according to industry's self-reported Toxics Release Inventory.
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© Raul Yzaguirre School for Success
A playground near a facility in the Houston Ship Channel. |
For MfCA Executive Director Jane Laping, devising an air-testing project allows members of the community to feel that they can positively affect their environment. "In identifying what that smell is that's been bothering us, we can trace it back to someone, and then confront the source," she said.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is helping MfCA identify chemicals from the 27 buckets collected to date. Analysis has revealed 50 different chemicals, including Freon 13, a chemical banned by the 1987 Montreal Protocol. The next step, tracing chemicals to specific sources, is part of a longer-term project for which MfCA is seeking funding.
The North American Fund for Environmental Cooperation (NAFEC) granted the group US$25,000 to produce educational materials in both English and Spanish that would help promote the initiative and raise awareness in the community. Other contributions came from Clean Air Action and Unidos Contra Environmental Racism.
Laping worries that a state bill passed by the Texas' Natural Resources Committee, but not yet approved by the state Senate, could end the recognition of
citizen-collected air samples. "We would be happy if the legislation died and the law stayed as it is now," said Laping.
The MfCA has many supporters, including the City
of Houston, which feels the pressure to clean up its air. Federal standards allow only three days every three years for a city's ozone to exceed 125 parts per billion. For the last two years, Houston has exceeded those levels an average of 50 days a year.
The city has promised the EPA to achieve that
three-day average by the year 2007.
Both Block and Laping say the people of southeast Houston have learned a lot about the various levels of government that are responsible for cleaning up the air. Everyone now has numbers to call and places to write.
With that satisfaction, as well as visibility in the community after the bucket brigade, the NAFEC grant and the ozone-level alert campaign it instituted at
area schools, Mothers for Clean Air may have gotten some locals to feel a little less winded by the daunting issue of air pollution.
NAFEC funding is awarded to environmental projects in Canada, Mexico and the United States that complement the CEC's work. For details and guidelines for applying, please visit our web site at <www.cec.org/grants>.
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