For decades, Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” — an 85-mile stretch of communities surrounded by fossil fuel and petrochemical plants — has stirred public concern about the health of youth living in the region. Residents of these communities experience higher rates of cancer and respiratory disease due to industrial air pollution. But “Cancer Alley” is just one high-profile example of environmental pollution’s effects on children’s health.
A study by Brown researchers provides a nationwide look at the scope of such pollution exposure.
By tracking the proximity of U.S. public and private schools to environmental hazard sites, a recent Brown study assesses how frequently students attend schools near potentially hazardous sites.
“While there are high-profile examples of schools being affected by nearby toxic emissions and rigorous research on how this impacts learning, we wanted to understand some basic facts about the scale and scope of this issue for all students in the country,” Grace Falken, project director at the Annenberg Institute and one of the study’s authors, wrote in an email to The Herald.
The researchers combined data on public and private school locations across the country with Environmental Protection Agency datasets cataloguing three different types of environmental hazard sites.
Combining the datasets revealed that “about 8% of schools are located within a quarter mile of a hazard site and 44% of schools are located within one mile of a hazard site,” according to Falken. “Even at a mile proximity, research documents meaningful impacts to child health, development and learning.”
Professor of Education and Economics Matthew Kraft, who coauthored the paper, emphasized that a quarter mile is just one lap around a high school track. Students attending school within this distance to environmental hazard sites “experience a high probability of exposure to the pollutants and carcinogens that nearby toxic sites release into the air, soil and water.”
Most environmental exposure studies are centered around the home or workplace, according to Kraft. But “students spend a huge amount of time at school, making it an important site for potential environmental exposure,” he wrote in an email to The Herald.
Kraft also noted that these findings revealed that “rates of potential exposure are highly inequitable, with Black, Hispanic and low-income students facing elevated risk.” According to the paper, Native students are 124% more likely to attend schools within a quarter mile of a hazardous site than their white peers. For Black and Hispanic students, that risk is 86% and 43% higher, respectively.
Yale Professor of Economics Janet Currie, whose research focuses on environmental and socioeconomic health threats, noted that childhood exposure to these toxins could lead to health inequalities later in life.
Kraft wrote that these effects are particularly harmful for younger students, “who are most vulnerable given the early stages of their neurological and physiological development.”
He added that the air, soil and water quality of schools that are nearby toxic sites should be frequently monitored, in order to “target remediation efforts where they are needed most.”
Currie wrote that she hopes these findings “will encourage school districts and policy makers to site new schools in cleaner sites, and to close the most affected existing schools.”
“The first responsibility is to test to see whether the chemicals at the site can be detected at the school,” Currie wrote. "If they can, then there is an obligation to either mitigate those exposures, or to move the students.”
“It’s one thing to see a problem, another to draft a solution and a whole other to actually get that solution implemented,” Falken wrote. “Advancing research in the policy space would have huge potential impact for reducing these exposures for students.”
Alice Xie is a section editor for Science and Research from Los Angeles, California. She studies Applied Mathematics and Biology, and enjoys reading gut wrenching literature in her free time.
