A University of Cincinnati professor and his students are working with Middletown residents to answer the neighbors’ questions on local environmental pollution.
Over the past decade, residents have actively monitored local steel producers, including filing a lawsuit against the U.S. EPA to enforce environmental nuisances.
They reached out to the University of Cincinnati with concerns about exposure to industrial pollution in 2020. Since the work started in 2021, UC Associate Professor-Educator Bob Hyland said they’ve “covered a lot of ground.”
“Over the last half decade, students have conducted a community perceptions of risk survey, they've done some air pollution gradient studies, and also more recently soil and water quality analysis and research,” Hyland said.
Hyland teaches at UC’s School of Environment and Sustainability, where he integrates this research into his coursework such as environmental writing or environmental studies capstones. His capstone courses often center around community engagement in communities that have environmental questions.
“Higher education and research more generally has a legacy of this town-gown or ivory tower problem where the experts come in, extract data from the community, and then kind of go on to publish and present those findings at a conference, and they don't always lead to better outcomes for the community,” Hyland said.
He’s also worked alongside communities like the Latonia neighborhood in Covington, Kentucky, and Lincoln Heights outside of Cincinnati. Each research question they use comes from information the communities want to know.
“The projects are predominantly community-engaged, community-led, around which students gather data that the community can then use to try to come up with solutions for the concerns about how the pollution is affecting their property and health,” he said.
Around 40 students have worked on research in Middletown through his capstone course. They’ve measured for compounds like arsenic and lead in soil and particulate matter, nitrous oxides and volatile organic compounds in the air — pollutants often associated with the steel industry.
They use professional testing instruments and receive faculty mentoring and advising.
Of their research results for Middletown, they identified three key findings:
- People living closer to the local steel mill reported higher concerns for health impacts.
- Soil samples taken from a resident’s yard located 1,000 feet from a steel mill blast furnace contained levels of arsenic 11 times greater than Ohio Department of Health’s recommendations levels in soil. Arsenic, which studies show can come from industrial processes like metal purification, can increase risk of various chronic diseases.
- In terms of the air quality assessments completed, the correlation between wind direction and particulate matter warrants more investigation to assess public health risk.
Students hold events to share their findings with residents, with their most recent one in Middletown taking place late April. Hyland believes that experiential learning is valuable.
“So by actually going out into the community and doing the work, the learning outcomes are stronger and the students' discovery of agency and satisfaction in the work is consistently stronger,” he said.
Hyland, his students and other UC researchers are working on a more robust soil and water investigation in Middletown. They hope to share the results with the community this summer.
