Banner by Julia Malnak

Wake Up and Smell the Sulfur

By Emily Liu

The plan was simple. When the University of Pittsburgh went on winter break, I would take a bus home and my sister, a Pitt employee, would drive to our house the next week. But the day she was supposed to come home, my sister called me. She said she’d arrive late because she noticed an alarming smell in her apartment and didn’t want to leave before finding out where it came from. After she met up with us, she told us that a huge part of the city was swamped by toxic emissions.

And she was right. For the second December in a row, the air in the Liberty-Clairton area of Pittsburgh was filled with air pollutants. By the EPA’s measure, residents were breathing at least five different pollutants, the most prevalent being hydrogen sulfide and particulate matter. On the Monday morning before Christmas Eve, the air quality in Pittsburgh was among the worst in the entire country.

Upon returning to campus in January, I could only hope that things had improved. But when I checked my floor’s group chat, the first thing I noticed was the number of worried questions my classmates were asking. They all called attention to the same issue: “Is there something different about the air? Does anyone else smell sulfur? Should we evacuate?”

That was the moment I decided to write this article.

The pollutants were traced to the Clairton Coke Works facility belonging to U.S. Steel Corp. The coke plant is located about 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, and in the process of heating coal to make coke for steel, it regularly generates hazardous byproducts. Carcinogens such as benzene and coke oven gas are constantly released into the air, and more often than not they stay in the air until they inevitably find their way into our lungs. In the words of Adam Kron, an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, the locals living near the Clairton plant “have said they’ve felt faint walking to the bus stop … they don’t know exactly what’s causing that.” Even under this circumstance, U.S. Steel remained silent on the issue.

In response to the most recent violation, Pennsylvania’s Clean Water Action organization called on the health department to warn residents as soon as possible and demanded that Clairton Coke Works cut back production levels to reduce emissions. The health department’s response? They attributed the bad air to the ongoing temperature inversions, during which any particles in the atmosphere would stay closer to ground level. In other words, they simply blamed the weather.

Air pollution is no laughing matter. We may not be able to see the particles going into our systems, but they are absolutely capable of triggering or worsening health problems in the people who breathe them. According to the World Health Organization, about 91% of the people in the world live in areas with excessive air pollution, 2 billion of whom are children. Air pollutants like those coming from Clairton pose a serious health risk to 3 billion people who cook with biomass and fossil fuels, and said pollutants cause one in nine deaths every year. We must act to ensure that the air is always breathable, rain or shine.

Last December in Pittsburgh, two main pollutants emitted by Clairton became especially problematic — particulate matter and hydrogen sulfide. Particulate matter, any of a group of microscopic particles, directly causes a range of conditions from bronchitis to heart attacks depending on how deep it penetrates into the lungs. These particles are usually less than 10 microns in size (1/8 as thick as a strand of human hair), and the vast majority are formed directly from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal.

Hydrogen sulfide, the other major pollutant, is also hazardous. While it doesn’t pose as many risks on its own, it can easily linger in the atmosphere for weeks or even months. Over that time, it can undergo chemical reactions in the air and produce sulfates and sulfur dioxide, both of which are much more harmful. Sulfates have similar effects on humans as particulate matter, while sulfur dioxide irritates the eyes and increases risk of respiratory infections. 

Air pollution is not like chicken pox — we can’t just wait it out or get one vaccine to fight it off for life. There are certainly some ways to remove small amounts of pollutants from the atmosphere; sulfur dioxide, for example, can be absorbed fairly effectively by seawater. However, these methods are usually accompanied by a costly setback. The water from the previous example must be discharged back into the ocean, but since it takes all the chemicals with it, this essentially just changes air pollution into equally dangerous water pollution. A hypothetical procedure to gasify coal and contain the hydrogen sulfide for industrial use still has yet to be proven successful, and washing inorganic sulfur off of coal before combustion comes with the risk of changing the coal’s physical state to the point where it doesn’t combust normally. So as of now, there is no clean and easy solution to remove airborne pollutants, and removal is not a steady enough crutch for fossil fuel users to lean on. 

Even if temperature inversions did contribute to the recent spike in pollution, that is no excuse to let U.S. Steel Corp. get away without making any changes. For the sake of everyone’s health, it would be best to cut down emissions to the point where the air would be clear even in the worst of inversions. If we put forth every effort possible to reduce emissions and even remove the ones already in the air, we’re sure to make a significant positive impact on the atmosphere. Then, the people of Pittsburgh and everyone living in polluted areas will finally be able to breathe easy.