Roughly 40 per cent of Canada’s petrochemical production takes place in an area known as Chemical Valley in Sarnia, Ontario. Located on the traditional territory of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, the region is home to an Imperial Oil refinery, one of the oldest facilities of its kind in the world.
That refinery, and the emissions it is responsible for, are the focus of Pollution Reporter, a new mobile app designed by a group of researchers including Reena Shadaan, a PhD candidate in York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies.
Developed by the Environmental Data Justice Lab at the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU) at the University of Toronto, Pollution Reporter aims to empower citizens by helping them link emissions directly to polluters and potential health harms, and to give community members a simple way to report pollution to the Ontario Spills Action Center. As an Indigenous-led lab guided by the protocols of Indigenous data sovereignty, the TRU doesn’t collect any data from the app.
Pollution Reporter team members Vanessa Gray, left, Reena Shadaan, Kristen Bos and Michelle Murphy
Pollution Reporter users can search emissions data related to the refinery by pollutant, health category or symptom. This includes under-represented health harms, such as hormone disruption, low-level effects, subclinical impacts (such as feeling a bit foggy), intergenerational effects and persistence in land and bodies, categories that, according to the app developers, are often neglected in government health research but are well-known and felt in communities.
Pollution Reporter aims to give community members a simple way to report pollution to the government
As a research assistant at the TRU and part of the lab’s environmental data justice team, Shadaan co-lead the creation of Pollution Reporter. Her role involved data research and working with an app development company, Reflektor Digital, to turn the team’s vision into reality.
Shadaan has been active in the field of environmental justice, having worked with survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster and focusing her current research on occupational hazards impacting discount nail salon workers, however this is her first time working on an app. She became involved with the TRU after the encouragement of her PhD supervisor, Dayna Scott.
Shadaan says learning how to convey complex information in a simplified way for the app, in contrast to the academic writing she is used to, has been an exciting learning experience, and has strengthened her own understanding of government and industry-produced pollution data.
Previously, those interested in the pollution in their community, or in any region, relied on information from the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI), a federal government agency responsible for an inventory of the emissions data that companies are required to collect and report annually.
With Pollution Reporter, created as part of a broader environmental justice project called “The Land and the Refinery:Past, Present, and Future,” Shadaan and her colleagues hope to make information about pollution and health harms more accessible, and to make connections between polluters, emissions and potential health impacts more transparent and explicit. Their aim is to highlight industrial and governmental responsibilities for pollution-related harms
The app includes health harms typically overlooked in government research but well-known in communities
Shadaan says that while the NPRI is a helpful resource, the information it contains and the way it is conveyed is limited and inaccessible. Information about hazardous chemicals associated with specific facilities can be found, but she says they often have complex names and lack descriptions of basic functions and effects.
With much of the existing data on pollution and health harms behind paywalls and conveyed in difficult language, Shadaan hopes the app will make understanding chemicals less off-putting. She cites her own example, having recently read about the effects of a chemical that impacted a gland located at the posterior of the ocular globes.
“They could just say it’s behind the eyeball,” Shadaan explained.
Shadaan sees the project, which she and her colleagues began working on in early 2018, as a success so far, but hopes to see it grow. There are plans in the short term to include data from other facilities in Chemical Valley, and eventually to expand beyond the region.
Pollution Reporter can be downloaded for free.