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Renwu is a part of Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, where there are large factories making chemical products. Renwu Elementary School is very close to these factories, just 500 meters away. The school has been actively engaged in discussions about how to improve the environment and promote prosperity for everyone. Approximately 80% of the students at the school have asthma, a respiratory condition. Recognizing the challenges of improving the environment around the school, some students and teachers decided to explore ways to improve the air quality within the school. The students did a few things: first, they used low-cost sensors and single-board computers to make regular air purifiers work better. When levels for air pollution (PM 10 and PM 2.5) are high, these gadgets turn on the air purifiers in many classrooms. This air purifier project is one of three ongoing educational programs aimed at educating students about air pollution and its potential health impacts. In art class, students use paper mache to design their own air purifiers to save money. Using magnifying glasses for tablets and smartphones, they explore which materials work best for air filtration. In parallel, they began collecting air pollution data over time using a digital system developed by the students themselves. They also used hand-held monitors outside to measure pollution levels around a major chemical factory operated by Formosa Plastics, a large petrochemical company. It is worth noting that Formosa Plastics is currently planning to expand its production facilities in Texas and Louisiana, which would also affect air quality in nearby schools. The monitoring and data collection by the Renwu students could inspire others in different places to do something similar about air pollution in their own communities. 

Schütz, Tim, Jia-An Lin & Yu-Hsin Hsu. 2023. "DIY Air Monitoring at Renwu Elementary School in Kaohsiung, Taiwan." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

• Flame retardant chemicals
• Migrate off of products and into air/dust
• Many are endocrine disruptors, interfere with the reproductive system and thyroid
• Stain repellent chemicals
• Polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFASs) or polyfluorinated chemicals (PFCs)
• Enter air, dust, and drinking water
• 6 million US residents have blood PFAS concentrations over EPA limit
• Associated with cancer, thyroid disease, immunotoxicity, reduced immune response to childhood immunizations
• Phthalates
• Enter air and dust
• Associated with asthma and allergies
• Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs)
• Environmentally persistent pollutant, endocrine disruptor, and probable carcinogen
• No longer used, but remain in estimated 25,000 US schools
• Prenatal exposure may affect height, weight, head circumference, and body size at puberty

The authors structure their argument around three metrics: student health, student thinking, and student performance. They define these as follows:

• Student health: the overall physical and biological health of a school building occupant.
• Student thinking: short-term impacts on cognitive function and mental well-being.
• Student performance: the successful long-term academic performance of students.

Through their review of more than 200 studies, they conclude that there is unambiguous evidence for negative effects of low environmental quality on all three of these metrics. Although it is discussed in less detail, they also reference studies that provide evidence for the improvement of these three metrics when issues with school infrastructure are addressed.

"Millions of K–12 students in America spend several hours a day learning in schools that are more than 50 years old and in need of extensive repair and where children may be exposed to mold, poor ventilation, uncomfortable temperatures, inadequate lighting, and overcrowded, excessively noisy conditions."

Emphasizes the scale of the issue--this is not a Philadelphia or Santa Ana or Azusa problem, it is a national issue for all public schools. Also emphasizes the breadth of the issues--there are so many different forms of environmental hazards in schools.

• Ventilation & air quality:
• Children breathe more air than adults relative to their body size
• Water quality:
• Contaminants like lead have greater effects on cognitive development and behavior of children than adults
• Thermal comfort
• Current models for thermal comfort are based on adults and do not predict children's comfort levels
• Children are more susceptible to the effects of heat stress
• Children's clothing and activity levels (major determinants of thermal comfort) are distinct from adults
• Lighting and views
• Children have larger pupils than adults
• Children have greater light-induced melatonin suppression--their Circadian rhythms are more susceptible to manipulation
• Noise
• Children under 15 are more sensitive to difficult listening conditions because they are still developing mature language skills
• Children need a greater signal-to-noise ratio in order to understand language
• Memory and attention development are sensitive to chronic noise exposure

"We recognize that beyond the four walls of the school building there are many environmental and social contexts that can adversely affect students’ well-being and undermine their academic potential. Inequities persist in the distribution of the social determinants of health, and students bring these influence with them every day when they walk through the doors of their school building."

Environmental injustice can't be an either/or issue of hazards inside or outside schools, it needs to be a both/and issue where hazards in schools are being addressed in conjunction with hazards outside of schools.

"The chronic impacts of a poor school environment often do not get the same type of attention as cases like these, because the links between building quality and health are subtler and less overt."

"These" is referring to a list of dramatic incidents where students were suddenly exposed to some kind of environmental hazard. This quote captures one of the biggest challenges of environmental justice work--in the many, many cases where it is not visible, it is hard to mobilize support, attention, and emotion because the links aren't flashy. This connects to ideas about slow disasters in Anthro 25A.

• Ventilation:
• 15 cubic feet of outside air per person or 5 liters per person per second
• Carbon dioxide concentrations below 1000 ppm
• Water quality:
• No amount of lead is safe
• National Primary Drinking Water Regulations (NPDWR)
• Thermal health
• Indoor temperatures between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit
• Lighting
• Minimum 350 lux, up to 1000 lux
• LED instead of fluorescent lighting
• Noise
• Maximum background noise: 35 dB
• Maximum reverbration time: 0.6-0.7 seconds

• Public schools are the second largest sector of US public infrastructure spending (after highways) - investment falls $46 billion short annually
• 60,000 schools, or 46% of public schools, have significant environmental hazards
• Students will spend 15,600 hours inside a school during K-12 education
• Schools are four times as densely populated as offices
• Childhood asthma accoutns for 13.8 million missed school days each year
• 31% of schools use portable classrooms
• Average school building in the US has a lifespan of 50 years, many are older than this

"School facilities represent the second largest sector of U.S. public infrastructure spending after highways, and yet no comprehensive national data source exists on K–12 public school infrastructure. Even at the state level, school facilities information is often scant. The death of official data and standards for our nation’s public school infrastructure has left communities and states working largely on their own to plan for and provide high-quality facilities. According to the Healthy Schools Network (2015), the U.S. Department of Education has never had any in-house staff with expertise in school-facility management or child environmental health. Moreover, there is no federal regulatory agency with the authority to intervene in schools to address known environmental health hazards; Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention health hazard evaluations and guidance are designed to protect the health of adult employees, such as school teachers and staff, but no agency has the overarching responsibility to ensure that children’s health is safeguarded at school. This must change. A National School Infrastucture Assessment, and National Director of School Infrastructure, are needed."

This quote does a number of things. It draws attention to the critical lack of data, especially publicly-available data, on school facilities. Without this data, it is nearly impossible to know the scope of the problem, prioritize actions across and within districts, or make connections between districts dealing with similar issues. Collaboration will be critical to our response to the challenges presented by environmental hazards in order to make sure we are not duplicating efforts in different locations. It also draws attention to the fact that no government agency is directly responsible for the health of children in school buildings and proposes the creation of a government agency to solve this problem. This is an interesting solution and is one I have not seen proposed elsewhere.