在宾夕法尼亚州西部修道院的理由下，在车库的屋檐下固定的两个小白色圆柱体正在帮助监视长期以来空气质量差的地区的空气，并且很快将面临来自广阔的巨大排放量。新的石化植物。
在匹兹堡以北约25英里处的圣约瑟夫姐妹姐妹周围的空气中，圆柱体不超过苏打水，收集有关颗粒和挥发性有机化合物（VOC）（VOC）的数据（VOC）。
监视器是马克·迪克森（Mark Dixon）在附近的网络的一部分，马克·迪克森（Mark Dixon）是一位独立的空中质量倡导者和电影制片人，自2016年以来一直在监视匹兹堡地区的空气污染。being builtby the oil giant Shell at Monaca on the south bank of the Ohio River, about five miles northwest of the convent. Dixon has so far installed 14 monitors within about five miles of the plant; he aims to add six more before the Shell plant opens.
该工厂将将乙烷从该地区的许多天然气井转换为小颗粒或“养育者”，将客户制成塑料产品。预计将于2022年开放。
Dixon and other air-quality activists fear the complex will worsen air quality in an area that has lived with air pollution from the coal and steel industries for decades. Despite the closing of many steel plants, Pittsburgh’s air quality is still ratedninth-worst in the United Statesfor year-round particulate pollution by the American Lung Association.
One community group monitors for noise around the gas fracking wells that will supply the Shell plant.
迪克森说，监测旨在确保壳在允许的水平范围内污染，并让公司知道“外壳上还有其他眼睛超越鼻子和眼球。”
迪克森（Dixon）使用的设备（每份$ 200至300美元）自动将信息上传到两个网站 -Purple AirandAirviz— that contain maps showing air quality at specific locations in near real-time. The monitors are now collecting baseline information that will be used to show any changes when the cracker plant begins operating.
Dixon acknowledged that the data gathered by his monitors isn’t “regulatory grade,” but argued that they give citizens a basis on which to make their case to regulators to set higher standards or just enforce current rules. He is funded by the Mountain Watershed Associations’sDirect Support Fund，为基层组织和倡导者提供少量赠款，从事环境正义，压裂和石油化学植物造成的污染。
In the Ohio River valley, residents are collecting fragments of plastic to compare with any leakage of nurdles from the new plant when it opens. The Mountain Watershed Association has been using fine nets to trap plastic debris in the river near the Shell plant.
该协会的社区组织者詹姆斯·卡托（James Cato）说：“您不希望人们在这些水域钓鱼，也不希望人们吃那些摄入养育犬的鱼。”“这些塑料颗粒不会生物降解；它们只是分解成最终在生态系统中的塑料大块。”
空中质量的倡导者马克·迪克森（Mark Dixon）在匹兹堡松鼠山区的家中。Jon Hurdle
另一个社区团体，Protect PT, monitors for noise around the natural gas fracking wells that will supply the Shell plant and is taking baseline readings around the plant site ahead of its opening. The group trains volunteers to gather noise data and then compares that with federal regulations to see if there’s a violation, said Gillian Graber, Project PT’s executive director. She said municipalities may have noise ordinances but may not have the capacity to enforce them. “The municipality is not going to have someone to do that in most cases; they don’t have the technology,” she said.
The practice of citizens using their own time and technical know-how to monitor the pollution of air, water, and land has been underway for decades, providing an additional layer of information on contaminants that threaten public health but may be overlooked by regulators or undercounted by companies. But improvements in low-cost technologies and a growing distrust of companies and regulators have recently swelled the ranks of citizen scientists.
“低成本监视器的可用性使参与程度更高，”Breathe Project，一个非营利组织，倡导宾夕法尼亚州西南部的空气质量。“参与的障碍要低得多。人们认识到，除非人们在与健康有关的问题上发表讲话，否则事情可能不会得到解决。”
为了更好的环境而社区, a California nonprofit, was a leader in this field starting in the 1990s when it helped local residents sample air in the San Francisco Bay area. Much of the sampling took place in low-income communities of color, with residents monitoring air near local refineries and sending samples for analysis by laboratories.
“主要用途是要求听到您的声音，并帮助人们组织起来，使他们的健康和社区变得更好，”非营利组织的前研究员格雷格·卡拉斯（Greg Karras）说。
A map on the Purple Air app shows near-real time readings of air quality at sites in the Pittsburgh area.Jon Hurdle
In the Santa Cruz Mountains near California’s Silicon Valley, Ryan Poling uses a sensor from Purple Air to monitor air pollution from wildfires in the region. Poling, 42, a software engineer, said the sensor alerted him to very high levels of microscopic particles called PM2.5 around his house as a result of this summer’s fires. The smoke forced him to stay indoors for about two weeks. He also installed two sensors inside that alerted him to unhealthy indoor air quality during the worst part of this summer’s fire season.
Poling and his family moved to California from Pittsburgh in 2018 partly to escape the Pennsylvania city’s air problems; he now finds he’s enveloped by unhealthy air for part of each year. His sensor, which cost him $249, automatically posts near real-time data about the fine-particle content of air at his house to the Purple Air website. The company says that about 30,000 of its sensors are installed worldwide, enabling people in many places to see what air quality is like in surrounding towns and regions.
他说：“我主要将其用作一种实时方式，看看是否可以在外面跑步，还是我应该呆在那天。”“我是否打开窗户？我需要关闭所有内容吗？”
In Pennsylvania, the Catholic community of the Sisters of St. Joseph has been hosting Mark Dixon’s air monitors since December 2020. Their presence is consistent with the sisters’ belief that they have a responsibility to God to care for the environment, and their concerns are heightened with the imminent opening of the Shell plant.
“对环境的保护肯定与我们的信仰有关，”正义与和平的会众协调员，居住在宗教团体的大约70名修女之一。她说，这些妇女受到教皇弗朗西斯2015年的百科全书的启发，Laudato Si, in which he calls for a higher standard of care for the natural environment.
Sister Kari Pohl of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Baden, Pennsylvania. The convent installed air monitors last year.Jon Hurdle
Pohl姐妹说，她有一天七月份戴着医疗标准的面具，因为她去修道院社区花园里的黑莓，因为空气质量很差。尽管她担心整个石化行业对环境的影响，但她专注于新的壳牌综合体。
她说：“壳植物可能是石化行业在我们地区扩展最明显的占地面积。”
Curtis Smith, a spokesperson for Shell, said the plant has been designed to minimize air emissions and is complying with all state and federal environmental regulations. “Regulations require that Shell demonstrate that the project will not impact air quality,” he said.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has permitted the plant to emit每年522吨VOC例如苯和甲苯，两者都是潜在的致癌物。那是more than twice as much由于克莱尔顿可乐工厂（Clairton Coke Works）在2018年发出了222吨VOC，这是匹兹堡地区污染的主要来源。
外壳植物还将被允许每年排放159吨PM2.5颗粒，通常是从烟囱或汽车发射的，可能会损害肺功能和lead to health problems, including an irregular heartbeat and aggravated asthma, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
约翰·斯托尔兹（John Stolz）是杜肯大学（Duquesne University）环境微生物学教授，也是天然气行业的长期批评家，据估计，饼干将每5至10年每5到10年需要从1,000多个新井中进行压裂天然气。Smith did not respond to requests for comment on Stolz’s projection, but he did say that natural gas will fuel a cogeneration plant on site, producing electricity, and that any excess power from the plant will be sold to the grid, which would potentially reduce carbon emissions from other fossil fuel use.
In 2017, the company agreed to set up air quality monitoring on the perimeter of its plant, in response to a lawsuit by the Clean Air Council and the Environmental Integrity Group, two nonprofits.
但是，即使有了公司自己的监控，人们还是需要公民收集的数据，这些数据通常比公司或监管机构更了解空气条件的变化。
“It’s usually the citizens who figure out what’s going on before the company discloses it,” said one activist.
Mehalik说，公民科学可以简单地从闻到空气不良的居民开始。在某些VOC监视器上检测到该发射，但他们没有识别出该化学物质。他说，数十人在Facebook页面上发布了他们的担忧，并向县官员报告了这一事件，县官员随后警告了州环境保护部。壳牌最终确定了该化学物质，但直到释放后四天才识别。
“This is why citizen science monitoring is critical, in that the feedback loop between smelling something and being able to raise the alarm and diagnose what the issue is requires citizens to pay close attention to what’s happening so that they can get information and resolution as quickly as possible,” Mehalik said. “It’s usually the citizens who figure out what’s going on before the company discloses it.”
A similar hands-on approach is being taken in Charleston, South Carolina, where a water-quality nonprofit found that the same kind of tiny plastic pellets that will be produced by the Pennsylvania Shell plant had leaked onto beaches and into waterways from a local shipping facility.
Charleston Waterkeeper, with a full-time staff of three, investigated a report that the pellets were fouling a local beach. The group then discovered that the material was widespread, especially near the plant, operated by Frontier Logistics, which was receiving the material by train from a cracker plant in Texas. That led to a sampling protocol that estimated the density of nurdles by individuals picking up as many as possible within 10 minutes. In some places, there were so many that sampling areas rarely exceeded 1 square meter, said Andrew Wunderley, executive director of Charleston Waterkeeper.
Randy Shannon has two air monitors fixed to his house in New Brighton, Pennsylvania.Jon Hurdle
去年3月，查尔斯顿水务员赢得了针对边境的诉讼，理由是该公司违反了两项联邦环境法，允许颗粒从其工厂及其火车上泄漏。该公司同意支付100万美元来创建水质基金。
“What I really hope is that it sends a message to these other facilities — if you don’t operate in a way that respects this community and respects our natural resources, we’re going to find out about it, using citizen science, and we’re going to hold you accountable,” Wunderley said.
In the western Pennsylvania town of New Brighton, about nine miles north of the Shell plant, Randy Shannon has two of Dixon’s monitors fixed to the corner of the house where he has lived for the last 30 years. Shannon, 74, is a long-time opponent of the local natural gas industry, which since the mid-2000s has been exploiting the rich reserves beneath southwestern Pennsylvania using the controversial technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Now he’s worried about what the Shell plant might do to local air quality, and he has gone so far as to take out a reverse mortgage on his home — meaning that the bank now owns it, but he’s allowed to live in it for the rest of his life — so that he can walk away if the air gets too bad.
他说：“真正的气氛可能会变得不健康。”“我担心空气质量可能会变得如此糟糕，以至于会影响房屋的价值。”
