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The Public Health Impact Of Air Pollution In New Jersey 2003-12-08 AirPollution12_03.pdf News Release

Executive Summary

As the new home of NJPIRG's environmental work, Environment New Jersey can be contacted regarding this report.

Air pollution takes a significant toll on human health in New Jersey every year, shortening thousands of lives and sending thousands of people to area hospitals.

Premature death and hospital admissions are the most visible indicators of widespread health damage caused by air pollution. This damage manifests itself in the incidence of disease like chronic bronchitis, increased emergency room visits, more frequent asthma attacks, and missed work days due to respiratory illness in otherwise healthy people. At the root of all of these health problems lies irreparable damage to lung tissues not unlike that caused by second-hand tobacco smoke.

This study calculates the magnitude of air pollution's impact on health in New Jersey using a number of information sources: air pollution monitoring data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); baseline health statistics from the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services and the U.S. EPA; a review of scientific studies on air pollution and health; and methodology based on similar work from the U.S. EPA and the World Health Organization.

These sources, taken together, indicate that thousands of New Jersey residents die prematurely because of soot in the air, and hundreds of thousands miss work because of air-pollution induced respiratory illness (see Table 1).

Additionally,during the summer smog season, smog causes chronic asthma in thousands of New Jersey adults, hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks, and millions of days of increased respiratory symptoms like shortness of breath (see Table 2).

Children are especially vulnerable to the effects of air pollution. Every year, particulates cause dozens of neonatal deaths and in the range of half-a-million school absences from illness (see Table 9).

Many New Jersey residents appear to experience adverse effects from pollution levels that comply with “health-based” air pollution standards. This leads to the jarring conclusion that even “safe ” levels of pollution are not, in fact, safe.

Aggressive action on both the state and federal level to reduce air pollution can improve public health. In order to have the greatest impact, action should focus first on the largest sources of pollution. Within New Jersey in 1999, nearly 60% of soot emissions and almost half of smog-forming emissions came from on-road and off-road mobile sources like cars, trucks,and construction equipment. Industrial facilities and emissions from consumer products like paint accounted for the remainder. Out-of-state pollution sources also contribute significantly to the overall problem.

State Level Actions:

• Strengthen auto emission standards in line with New York, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont.

• Reduce car-dependent land use practices and sprawl.

• Increase the portion of state transportation funding for transit, rail freight, and other alternative transportation projects.

• Require diesel engines, including school bus fleets and construction equipment, to be retrofitted with particulate filtration systems and to use low-sulfur fuel.

• Require diesel engines in marine vessels and trains to have selective catalytic reduction systems.

Federal and Regional Level Actions:

• Advocate adoption of these state policies among neighboring and upwind states.

• Restore the New Source Review provision of the Clean Air Act and require the oldest coal-fired power plants and other industrial facilities in the country to install modern emissions control technology.

• Limit nationwide industrial emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury to between 10% and 30% of 2000 levels.

• Strengthen national emission standards for cars, trucks, and off-road vehicles, including incentives for manufacturers to produce cleaner vehicles, modeled after California state policy.