Undergraduate Research

Tracking and Tackling Air Pollution in Newark’s Residential Neighborhoods

As a first-year college student in a new city, Vishva Rana ’23 quickly became attuned to the world outside her classroom walls. A paper on urban sustainability led her to environmental justice campaigns waged by residents of Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, whose ire was trained on a polluting city incinerator and the continual stream of diesel trucks slicing through the heart of their community.

“The problems were so obvious and large-scale, but people seemed powerless to change them. Many of their mitigation proposals were shot down,” recounts Rana. By sophomore year, the mechanical engineering major had joined the fight, winning a $2,000 Moonshot Prize from the Albert Dorman Honors College for her proposal to develop a real-time air quality monitoring system to deliver precise air quality information at any location in the community.

The system consists of sensors connected to small computers with Wi-Fi capability that capture and transmit data to an online database and display it on a heat map. Color coding indicates real-time levels of pollution around the neighborhood. It monitors what is known in regulatory language as particulate matter 2.5. (PM2.5), tiny particles of soot emitted by combustion engines that are two and a half microns or less in width. The devices can be powered by any building service and connected to a web app or phone app interface displaying the heat map, thus accessible to the public.

“I focus on PM2.5 because it’s the most abundant pollutant in the city and bad for lung health in particular. A quarter of children in Newark develop asthma at a young age and many studies suggest they are linked,” notes Rana.

The state Department of Environmental Protection currently monitors PM2.5, among other pollutants, in Newark, but only from a single monitor.

“Without constant field testing from dispersed monitors, it’s hard to pinpoint the particular spots where you have high levels of air pollution, determine the sources and then develop specific solutions,” she notes. “All of this technology is so intertwined with policy and I’ve become really interested in that side of it. In the Ironbound, it is essential to give organizers, who are often women and people of color, the power to monitor and design their own communities.”

Monitors placed on heavily trafficked roads would measure the amount of pollution emitted by diesel trucks, for example, allowing the community to see which routes are most polluted and divert some traffic away from them. Knowing exactly how much pollution the county trash incinerator is discharging near homes and schools would strengthen arguments for better emission controls.

“Going forward, we should design truck routes, for example, that won’t adversely affect residential areas, that accommodate the existing infrastructure,” she argues. Still in the beta testing phase, she has presented the idea to people in the Ironbound in brief interactions on the street and handed out flyers seeking feedback on residents’ perception of their
air quality and her technology’s usefulness.

She’s working this year with the Ironbound Community Corporation, a nonprofit advocating for community justice in the neighborhood, to locate places to install her monitors. “I can’t just stick them up. I’ll need to find private businesses that are willing to host sensors,” she explains.

Rana, who is minoring in entrepreneurship, gauged wider interest in the system in the Highlander Foundry Program at VentureLink@NJIT, a 12-week startup incubator. She
was encouraged.

“I spoke to people in logistics and transportation, including the owner of a shipping startup at the port, and found that companies are interested in tracking their own emissions,” she recounts. “I think there is a sense that more regulations are coming, and so private companies want to know how much pollution they’re emitting. They could place a sensor on their trucks, for example, or along their travel routes.”

A Fly Fisherman Diagnoses Maladies on a Beloved River

Wading into a parched stretch of the Pequannock River two summers ago, Taylor VanGrouw got a jarring reminder of the fragility of New Jersey’s smaller waterways: a brown trout stranded in a shallow pool, too lethargic to swim away as he approached.

“As temperatures rise, dissolved oxygen levels decline, in the way a bottle of soda, when hot, can’t hold its fizz. Starved of oxygen, trout can’t feed or reproduce. As temperatures
rise, they become more stressed and need more oxygen,” notes VanGrouw, who is now a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering.

An avid angler, he’d been casting his flies up and down the river since he was 15 and had seen their numbers dwindle, even in its deeper sections. He was not prepared to attribute the entire problem to global warming, however, and write it off. “I’ve seen what conservation efforts can do and did not view this as a lost cause. There are factors that can be fixed.”

He decided to investigate the trout’s decline by testing a suite of water conditions at 16 places in the river and its tributaries, gathering a broad range of data, while pinpointing major points of stress. Depending on his findings, he planned to present his results to state environmental officials and propose possible interventions.

On a weekly basis in June and July of last summer, he checked pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, nitrates, phosphates, macroinvertebrate populations and water clarity, according to “Trout Unlimited” guidelines on habitat sustainability. NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College provided research funds — and encouragement. He applied for and won a Moonshot Prize that brought $3,500 to support him over the summer and an additional $2,000 to buy professional equipment, including electronic testing probes, chemical kits, a water clarity device and a fine aquatic net to catch and identify bugs.

He found every factor in an acceptable range, except for water temperature. But in a key finding, this was only the case on a stretch of the river in the Macopin Reservoir, a decommissioned dam, and in the water below it, where temperatures spiked above the 68 degrees essential for trout survival. Temperatures upstream of the reservoir were 10 degrees cooler than 1.5 miles downstream.

Compared to other parts of the river, the old reservoir “has a huge increase in surface area exposed to the sun, with no overhanging tree canopy to shade it. The water is more stagnant, sitting longer to warm up.” A shallow reservoir, it lacks the deeper, colder water that can be released to lower temperatures.

VanGrouw met with a wildlife official from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection who was interested in his results, telling him there were no temperature probes on the river at that time, but that the state would consider installing them in the spring.

As possible remedies, he recommended removing the old dam, while also releasing colder water from larger, deeper reservoirs up the river as needed. Going forward, VanGrouw hopes to work with local governments to create a plan to mitigate the heating effects of the Macopin Reservoir on the river’s ecosystem.

“I saw the Pequannock as a forgotten river that no one was monitoring. Its problems were falling under the radar,” he says, noting that a coalition that had once advocated for cold water releases had fallen silent in recent years.

“The wild trout’s decline is a crucial indicator of water quality degradation in the Pequannock, which supplies water to 500,000 New Jersey residents, including the city of Newark,” he says, adding that hot spots in the river hurt the entire river ecosystem. “Bugs can’t survive, fish and birds can’t eat, and algae blooms increase.”

As a tributary to one of New Jersey’s largest rivers, the Passaic River, the Pequannock sends its problems downstream. “There has been a lot of effort to restore the Passaic and we don’t want to put that in jeopardy by bad water coming in from above.”