Smelly air? There’s an app for that

Smell PGH turns odorous complaints into official reports on pollution

On too many days, air pollution permeates swaths of Pittsburgh with the smell of dirty industry. At our offices in the East End, early mornings often bring a sulfurous odor of rotten eggs from big polluters like the Clairton Coke Works in the Mon Valley. Neighbors in Lawrenceville catch strong whiffs of burning metal from McConway & Torley foundry nearby. Up the Allegheny River, residents in the town of Oakmont smell coal burning at the Cheswick power plant.

Fortunately, local innovators have designed the app Smell PGH (www.smellpgh.org) that works to ensure that these smells hit the regulatory radar.

The app is simple. If you smell something, report it. Smell PGH crowdsources complaints so citizens can become advocates in reducing air pollution in their communities. It also allows users to view anonymous reports from concerned citizens across the county who have reported equally nasty smells. These complaints are shared with the Allegheny County Health Department, which helps to facilitate the identification of pollution sources and encourage better airquality standards.

These smells aren’t just nuisances; they impact our health. High concentrations of airborne toxics and particulates make us sick. These emissions force us to breathe cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene, microscopic particulate matter known as PM2.5 and asthma-inducing pollutants like sulfur dioxide.

The stakes are high in Allegheny County, where residents face a high risk of cancer from toxic pollutants. The Environmental Protection Agency’s most recent National Air Toxics Assessment found residents here face the third highest risk of cancer from point-source air pollution in the nation. Smog pollution makes it more likely that the one in 10 county residents who suffer from asthma will experience an attack.

For many, this translates into expensive visits to the hospital, sick days and a real threat that our lungs will be constricted by the air we breathe.

These smells can mean that major polluters are violating the terms of their air regulation permits. The Allegheny County Health Department is responsible for issuing and enforcing those permits; unfortunately, facilities like the Clairton Coke Works find it’s cheaper to pay small fines hundreds of times rather than fix the toxic pollution problem. For other plants such as Universal Stainless & Alloy Products in Bridgeville, which has been without an updated Clean Air Act permit for seven years, industry is permitted to pollute the air freely at outdated emission levels.

At the end of the day, it’s clear that we need to take this issue into our own hands, with a tool designed to truly protect our health. With the release of this new app from Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, Smell PGH offers an open-source digital repository for these odorous complaints, turning them into official reports that go straight to local environmental regulators.

The beauty and power of Smell PGH is the creation of a community willing to face the impacts of poor air quality together. That’s critical because we will need to work together to advocate for the changes needed to clean up our air. With more records of residents experiencing direct negative impacts of air pollution on their quality of life, this app makes it easier to push the health department to take the issue seriously and clean up these big polluters.

Stephen Riccardi is the Western Pennsylvania field organizer for the PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center (stephen@pennenvironment.org). Beatrice Dias is a project director at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab (bea.createlab@gmail.com).