Faculty Mentor: Sara Grineski (Sociology, University of Utah)

Environmental hazards disproportionately impact people of color and people of lower income. Specifically, people of color and people of lower income face higher levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5). PM2.5 leads to nearly 200,000 deaths in the U.S. per year. (Collins et al., 2022; Tessum et al., 2021). These disparities have been found throughout the U.S. and within Salt Lake County (SL Co). From February to May 2024, we phone surveyed 542 residents of SL Co about their perceptions of air pollution. We asked respondents if air pollution affects people of color worse than White people and if air pollution affects people of lower income worse than people with higher incomes. We found that respondents generally disagreed with those statements, Of the two, the statement regarding people of color had a lower level of agreement. This contradicts existing disparities in air pollution exposure between people of color and White people locally (Collins and Grineski 2019; Mullen et al., 2020) Those not living on the Westside of SL Co and women disagreed slightly less than other demographic groups. This implies a disconnect between public perception of environmental injustice and scientific research on the topic.

Bibliography

Collins, T. W., & Grineski, S. E. (2019). Environmental injustice and religion: Outdoor air pollution disparities in metropolitan Salt Lake City, Utah. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(5), 1597–1617. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1546568

Collins, T. W., Grineski, S. E., Shaker, Y., & Mullen, C. J. (2022). Communities of color are disproportionately exposed to long-term and short-term PM2.5 in Metropolitan America. Environmental Research, 214, 114038. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2022.114038

Mullen, Casey J., Sara E. Grineski, Timothy W. Collins, Wei Xing, Ross Whitaker, Tofigh Sayahi, Tom Becnel, Pascal Goffin, Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardon, Miriah Meyer, and Kerry E. Kelly. (2020) Patterns of Distributive Environmental Inequity under Different PM2.5 Air Pollution Scenarios for Salt Lake County Public Schools. Environmental Research 186:109543. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2020.109543.

Tessum, C. W., Paolella, D. A., Chambliss, S. E., Apte, J. S., Hill, J. D., & Marshall, J. D. (2021). PM2.5 polluters disproportionately and systemically affect people of color in the United States. Science Advances, 7(18). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf4491