Detroit’s industrial past and present mean people around the city don’t have clean air to breathe. This story is part of Exhausted in Detroit, a series copublished with Outlier Media examining our air quality problem and what can be done. See the full series here.
Breathing, a fundamental fact of life, is tinged with risk in any industrial city. And Detroit has embraced industry and highways — key sources of air pollution — more tightly than most.
Air pollution causes burdensome health problems, keeps kids out of school and leads to hundreds of early deaths every year.
Political leaders and ordinary people can do more to help Detroit breathe easy. That’s perhaps the single most important finding of collaborative reporting by Planet Detroit, Outlier Media and the Ecology Center about air quality in the city.
Taking action starts with getting informed. We know Detroiters are busy, so consider this the shortest version of the facts you’ll need to better understand the city’s air.
5th
Detroit’s rank on a list of U.S. ‘asthma capitals’
One hundred cities in the United States were ranked in the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America’s 2023 report.
38%
Portion of particulate pollution in the Detroit area attributable to traffic and other ‘mobile sources’
The largest sources of air pollution in Wayne County are trucks, railways, boats and construction equipment.
Detroit is criss-crossed by major thoroughfares that run alongside large neighborhoods or schools.
“The biggest polluters are roadways because of trucks, which produce a lot more pollution than cars,” said Bob Wahl, a Michigan State University environmental epidemiologist, who added that trains are another major mobile source in Detroit.
868
Average number of diesel trucks per day expected at a new warehouse in northwest Detroit
Some residents are worried about diesel exhaust expected at a just-completed warehouse in an industrialized part of northwest Detroit. The city, which helped underwrite the deal with a tax incentive worth upward of $22 million, has worked hard to attract industry, which means more trucks. Diesel fumes are linked to numerous health problems, including cancer, asthma and heart disease.
The number of trucks expected is four times more than the estimated 200 per day that travel to and from the Amazon warehouse on the former Michigan State Fairgrounds.
2 years, 8 months
Time without a Detroit truck ordinance since a study laid out how one could work
Many cities establish legal truck routes to keep semis, their noise and exhaust away from residents. Big cities like Los Angeles and New York have such ordinances. So does Detroit’s neighbor, Dearborn.
Residents of Southwest Detroit have complained for decades about relentless truck traffic from its bustling international border. Those concerns have spread to other neighborhoods in recent years as the city has worked to attract new industrial facilities.
A 2021 effort to kickstart a truck route ordinance for Detroit didn’t get further than a study of the matter. What’s next? Another study, the city says.
22
Number of air quality Action Days called for the Detroit area in 2023
That’s the most warnings since 1999, when the area saw 25 ozone action days, and it’s up from 13 in summer 2022. Smoke from wildfires in Canada wafted repeatedly through the region, setting off alarms with state regulators.
The smoke prompted the state to create a new type of air quality action alert for particulate matter. Until this year, the state had only ever issued such advisories for ozone.
48%
Reduction in Wayne County particulate pollution between 2000 and 2017
The amount of PM2.5, the smallest form of particulate pollution, fell sharply in recent decades, thanks in large part to the closure of coal-fired power plants and the advent of cleaner car fuels and engines.
Experts credit much of the change with vehicle emissions restrictions created under the federal Clean Air Act. The legislation boosted American life expectancies by 1.4 years, by one estimate.
570,000
Estimated days of school missed by Detroit children due to health problems linked to air pollution in 2016
The toll of air pollution reaches far beyond illness itself. One study also estimates that children in the region suffer more than 760,000 days of restricted activity due to air pollution and 3,300 emergency room visits caused by asthma.
660
Number of premature deaths per year caused by air pollution in Detroit
In Detroit alone, particulate matter and ozone are responsible for about 1,500 annual hospitalizations for respiratory and cardiovascular disease, as well as 660 premature deaths, a 2016 University of Michigan study found.
$40
Cost of creating an effective at-home air filter
The region’s residents can take simple, meaningful steps to protect themselves from air pollution, experts say.
Perhaps the simplest and most inexpensive option is to add a filter to your furnace or air conditioner with an EPA-established MERV-13 rating.
Don’t have a furnace or HVAC system? No worries. You can tape a $20 filter to a $20 box fan and get similar results.
This model has been tested by scientists and it works. It’s a DIY version of air filters to avoid spending hundreds of dollars on a ready-made model. Here’s how to make yours.
74.3 years
Life expectancy for Wayne County
That’s compared to 79.9 years in Oakland County, Detroit’s affluent northern neighbor, in 2023.
Experts believe that air pollution contributes to this gap even as they stress that a wide range of factors are at play. An analysis of life expectancy by ZIP code found those who live in more polluted areas in Detroit typically have much shorter life expectancy than those in wealthier, less polluted ZIP codes in the same metro area by as much as 10 years.
There are names behind these statistics
To some Detroiters, all this data doesn’t begin to measure the human toll of air pollution.
Theresa Landrum, an environmental activist who grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Southwest Detroit, has no trouble thinking of examples.
Miss King down the street died of brain cancer several years ago. A woman Landrum was in a club with died of lung cancer, and she never smoked.
Her neighbors Mary, who everyone called MayMay, Andrea Hill, and Rita Hayes all died young from cancer. Andre – who lives a few streets over – battled nasal cancer.
Mr. and Mrs. Coleman died from cancer, and their son is dealing with a diagnosis now. Landrum, her mother, father, brother and two aunts who lived in the neighborhood all battled cancer.
Tracing a cancer to a single cause is often impossible. Still, Landrum is convinced that she and her neighbors are among the human toll of air pollution in metro Detroit.
“This is not normal,” Landrum said.
Editor’s Note: This series is funded through a civic science and journalism collaboration grant through the Rita Allen Foundation with support from the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Journalism organizations Planet Detroit and Outlier Media and civic science organization Ecology Center partnered to produce the stories for this project. Planet Detroit and Outlier Media made all editorial decisions independently of Ecology Center, which provided technical expertise and guidance.
Tom Perkins and Nina Ignaczak contributed reporting to this piece.