Colorado Voices
How pollution affects health and happiness
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SJEQ-D study measures the role air pollution plays on health & happiness in residents.
CU Boulder's Social Justice & Environmental Quality in Denver (SJEQ-D) study measures the role air pollution and construction noise play on the health and happiness of surrounding residents.
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Colorado Voices is a local public television program presented by RMPBS
Colorado Voices
How pollution affects health and happiness
Clip | 3m 30sVideo has Closed Captions
CU Boulder's Social Justice & Environmental Quality in Denver (SJEQ-D) study measures the role air pollution and construction noise play on the health and happiness of surrounding residents.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipAir pollution is something you don't often see.
You can see the Denver brown cloud, but that's a different kind of experience than everyday particulate air pollution.
I'm Professor Shelly Miller.
I am a faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder, and I'm one of the principal investigators of this project Social Justice and Environmental Quality in Denver.
I was really happy to be a participant with the SJEQ Atmo Tube study.
It was with CU Boulder and I worked really closely with their researchers to understand the contaminants in my area.
So this is the atmo tube.
Mine is well-loved condition.
They try to give us the same atmo tube that we've been using throughout the study.
The goal of the project is to understand the environmental impacts and social impacts and well-being impacts on the North Denver communities that have been significantly impacted by all the construction going on around the C 70 project and other development projects in that region.
So we have a multi-pronged approach and that has enabled us to really understand what the community members care about and what they need more support around.
We also then have a technical team, which is based on computer science approaches and then an environmental team, which is based on air quality science.
And the community members get this air pollution monitor that they carry with them every day for a month.
And what the air pollution monitor does is measure the air quality that they're experiencing.
And what would happen is I would wear this either as a keychain on my backpack, on my person.
And what's awesome about this is it was always monitoring the humidity, the temperature and also the PM1 levels.
Those are typically levels of toxins in the area, whether that's dirt or skin cells or just general kind of fuzz in the air.
So that was really helpful to have this to kind of gauge and look back on day by day.
We have analyzed the data that we have collected and we have actually found some very interesting results from there.
We saw a essentially a direct correlation between the happiness level of the people and their distance from site of the construction.
The poorer the air quality or the noise pollution is, the less happy the people were.
So one of the unique aspects of this study was that we decided to provide the citizens with immediate mitigation strategies.
We've made air cleaners for all the participants.
We tested the air cleaners in our labs to make sure they were working, and then we gave them to all the participants who wanted one.
And these air cleaners will filter out the particulate matter in their environment and reduce the exposure concentration.
And so thereby improving the health of the residents that are using them.
I really enjoyed that study because it really allowed me to say what is exactly happening around me in my neighborhood and not having to rely on another air monitor down the street.
And so even on the days that I think it's a perfectly clean environment, there's still the freeway, there's still Suncor, there's still a slaughterhouse, there's all these different chemical polluters in the area.
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Colorado Voices is a local public television program presented by RMPBS