Darren Riley didn't have trouble breathing until he moved to southwest Detroit.
He developed asthma in 2018, about two years after he made Detroit his home. The diagnosis was a surprise after growing up as a childhood athlete in Houston, Texas, another city with a significant heavy industry.
He believes it was the environment that brought on the disease. Southwest Detroiters live near manufacturing facilities, busy trucking routes, rail yards and highways — all sources of air pollution that can harm health.
"It definitely opened my eyes to the environmental impacts, implications, of where you live, where you work, and where you play," Riley said.
Riley has dedicated himself to helping communities monitor, understand and improve the air around them. He co-founded JustAir, a company that partners with community groups, municipalities and companies to help them track local air pollution. The company also offers air quality alerts delivered by text message.
Riley sat down with The Detroit News at JustAir's headquarters at Newlab in the former Book Depository building in Corktown. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What kinds of projects do you have underway right now?
Answer: We have partnerships with many nonprofits within Detroit, some of the leading environmental justice organizations. They've been tremendous and honestly are why JustAir exists today.
We have partnerships with Dearborn, with the department of public health. Their leadership's focus as operating the city with an intentional lens of health and public health awareness is really amazing, so we're certainly excited to partner with them. That project is going and more to come next two years.
We have partnerships in Kalamazoo, with the city of Kalamazoo, and also we've been building a lot of coalitions in Grand Rapids and we have some monitors out there.
Our biggest upcoming project is with Wayne County. We're deploying 100 monitors throughout the county in collaboration with a taskforce of representatives from communities. We're also deploying mobile monitors that youth will carry with them. It's a deep, one-of-a-kind project correlating asthma with the environment.
The project is thanks to leadership of the county executive and the leadership of the health director Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. They want to really make sure that the data is accessible throughout the county, to help the county be more thoughtful and proactive on intervening in areas where there is air pollution or where residents experience the health effects of air pollution.
Q: Late last year you were featured in an advertisement for Joe Biden's reelection campaign. What can you tell me about it?
A: We are grateful to have our work highlighted by the Biden campaign. However, our work and efforts towards clean air is not political. It's about the health and safety of all residents. JustAir does not endorse political candidates.
JustAir's vision is simply clean air for all, regardless of social, political, or religious beliefs. In order for us to reach that vision, it will take efforts from all leaders across the country. It should not be political, but we do need policy.
Q: Speaking of policy, what do you think can local, state and federal governments do to improve air quality?
A: The first step is making sure we have better air quality monitoring infrastructure. You can't make something better if you don't know what's happening.
In the near-term, we have great opportunity with zoning. I was just in Grand Rapids, where we have some monitors, and communities use them to decide where they should build a park, where they should add green space, what areas should be zoned as residential or industrial. Making sure we have that conversation now through an environmental lens helps us prevent issues 20 years down the road.
We have an opportunity here in Michigan to take the lead on this within the United States, not just by saying we're a climate haven but actually showing what we're doing to be an environmental and climate haven.
We should consider the implications poor air quality has on health, and look at the benefits of clean air rather than the cost of more regulation, more red tape. Imagine a world where people are going to school, learning better, where we're keeping people out of the emergency room and employees are working because we are protecting health proactively. That's a world I want to wake up to. We can change the culture.
Q: Why have a text-alert system when air quality information is available online?
A: Our whole motto is to make sure that data is accessible. Not just like, 'hey, click on that website, click on a dot and you can see the air quality right now.' We want to communicate better, explain what the air quality index is, what people can actually do to protect themselves from unhealthy air.
There are people who can afford the time and mental capacity to go look up the day's air quality index and plan, or look at the weather and plan. Some people can't; they're thinking about putting food on the table or have to get straight to work.
We're basically trying to remove that mental load and provide that information, make it accessible. That's why we do text alerts, it's why we're working on authentic translation into different languages.
That's something we really pride ourselves on, making sure this data is accessible and that we're proactive.
Q: The state has air quality monitors. Why add more?
A: Air monitoring helps us meet our goal of looking at the intersection of air quality and health. We have three pillars of change that we talk about — 1: behavioral, 2: environmental, and 3: structural.
Behavior is the near-term. We learned that during the forest fires this summer. We can tell people when air quality is unhealthy and remind them how to mitigate the harmful effects of pollution.
On high ozone days, for example, maybe it's a good idea to carpool or refrain from pumping gas, or maybe pick another day to mow your lawn. In the case of high particulate matter, like from the fires, wear an N95 mask, maybe reschedule your child's soccer practice.
I was always taught by environmental justice leaders that you don't just tell people the world is on fire without giving them a fire extinguisher. You're just going to give them more trauma, make people more anxious with all the things that are going on in the world. We have to be mindful of that.
On the environmental side, our partners use data to measure the effects of environmental change. Maybe they notice a community is heavily impacted by diesel fumes, then decide to upgrade to electric school buses. They can measure air quality at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., school drop-off and pick-up times, and see whether air quality is affected by the electrification. They can measure whether that decreases asthma absenteeism in their schools.
Structural change is long-term. There are policies out there that we can definitely put on the books, but how do we enforce them? With our monitors, not only can we inform policy, but we can measure its effects and help enforce it.
