OPENAIR – Tackling air pollution at the local level

Peter Runcie:

My name's Peter Runcie. I'm the Project lead for the Atlanta Project. So the open ended project came about in 2020. This is just after the time of the 20 1920 bushfires, and we had communities all around the state and the country indeed facing lots of smoke. We sent a survey out to all of the councils in New South Wales asking them two questions.

So the first question was do you have issues with air quality and if so, what sort? And then the second question was around technology asking councils were they aware of the availability of low-cost environmental sensors and do they know how to use them? Almost all councils said they had problems with bushfire smoke, which is understandable. But many of them came back and said, Look, we've got issues with transportation related air pollution from road, rail or airports.

We've got industrial pollution from industrial zones, but also agricultural burning dust from mines and railway lines. And we've got problems with heat. So there was a range of different issues from different councils. The second question around technology, most of them came back and said, we've heard about these low-cost sensors that you're talking about, but we really don't know how to choose the right one.

We don't know how to install it. What do you do with the data? And then how do you use that data to actually make sort of interventions in the community and then improve outcomes for people? 

Andrew Tovey:

The project had several objectives. The first was to bring together councils that were interested in working with these new sensing technologies. The other main thing that we were doing is to try to establish a growing community of practice.

This is where the role of the New South Wales Department of Planning environment was really important. So New South Wales DPP run a regulatory network of air quality sensors in New South Wales, and they are the foremost authority on ambient air quality sensing. They have recognized the importance of these technologies. They really wanted to sort of step in with OPENAIR and take leadership and show that we can bring local governments together and we see OPENAIR as the beginning of a much longer-term process of community of practice building.

Sameer Pandey:

City of Parramatta. We pride ourselves in being a smart city. Parramatta Square is one of those areas where there has been massive development in the past few years. Church Street as well is one of those areas where there is massive changes, both of them very high pedestrian traffic. Those were very obvious choices for us to install the sensors and monitor the air quality in those areas.

The data that we collect from the sensors is shared with the New South Wales Government and this will help us to manage the city in a better way. I should also mention that there is a collaboration of other councils as well, and there's a network of councils where we share and talk about this data and how this will impact on communities in each of the council areas to improve the quality of life within our communities.

Ingo Koernicke:

One of the great opportunities of being involved with the OPENAIR Project was that it gave Council the opportunity to investigate local air pollution in the Sydney metropolitan area. Air pollutants have generally been stable or in decline except for two key pollutants, and they are particulates and ozone particulates. What a life. Well, they're really like fine dust that can easily get trapped in your lungs into your bloodstream, and they can have serious health impacts.

Bushfires, for instance, hazard reduction burns. We get smoke from wood fuelled heaters, also from vehicular emissions in particular diesels. Because the southern is situated on a bush interface, it's subjected to bushfires. They get hazard reduction burns. You would expect that the smoke and the particulates would collect in these river valleys, more so than, say, up in the ridge areas where we've got our urban areas.

And to measure that. The sensors that we've been able to get from the OPENAIR program. We'll be able to test that hypothesis. Is that the case? We've chosen to locate the air monitoring sensors in the valley areas because that's where we think that there's going to be a higher risk to our communities in those areas from particulates.

The data that we're going to get from these sensors will either confirm that or maybe provide some other interesting information. So we've got two sensors, one here in the Woronora River Valley, one in the Hacking River Valley. And as a contrast to those two, we've got one at Miranda. So that we can really have a look at the contrasting environments and how the topography affects it, even things like traffic volumes.

In the case from Miranda, for instance, you know, is that a contributor to particulates, for example, by developing a network of other monitors around, potentially around our shire, we'll be able to target responses to the air quality in those particular areas. 

Andrew Tovey:

There's also a big range of applications around transport, building arguments for removing cars from certain areas, electrifying public transport fleets and all kinds of smaller localized interventions that would change actually for the better around transport.

Heather Stevens:

Well, you can see from where I'm standing, Newcastle is home to the world's largest coal port and up to 40 trains come through this location every day carrying tons and tons of coal out to the port. We know that there is a high level of coal dust that is in our city, and this is in residents’ houses, in their backyards.

We don't really know yet where it's from. It could be from the coal trains. It could also be from the stockpiles. So we hope this project will actually help to quantify where coal dust is coming from and under what conditions it occurs. It's only sensors across our local government area was actually quite complicated because they're quite finicky, fussy little machines.

They want to make sure that they're not too much shadow, not vandalised. And they're actually, of course, relevant to the source, which is for us the coal rail lines and also stockpiles. But we did come up with a really innovative solution. We found that we have swimming pools located across the LGA that are nicely spaced but also relevant to where the coal trains are coming through.

So we've installed sensors at all of our inland and coastal swimming pools. We have one extra one which is actually here next to a really busy part of the rail line. So there's a lot of challenges in installing a local air quality system. The first is that council staff don't usually have the resources or the expertise to do such technical processes.

So we've been really fortunate to use the funding that was provided from Department of in Planning and Environment to engage University of Newcastle. So the university has provided us with a scholarship for a stay and that student is actually doing the technical elements that is necessary to do this project as a quality needed. 

Mitchell Aafjes:

 Essentially at the end of my master's degree, I really want to go into further education and so I approached my supervisor at the time, which was Dr. Heather Stevens, and she essentially had a project through OPENAIR, which is installing sensors around Newcastle and monitoring the coal up here at Newcastle.

So the city of Newcastle Council actually bought nine cyplex tic toc sensors. Now the reason why we chose these sensors are not only are they easy to install, but they actually measure a lot of variables which we want to do to research. So they measure things like particulate matter. 2.5 particulate matter, ten wind direction, wind speed, humidity, temperature and all these other variables we'll actually use for that my research and for the actual council. 

So in terms of this project, I'm looking at answering certain research questions to do with the local air pollution here in Newcastle, but also helping the council achieve the industry goals. 

Andrew Tovey:

These low-cost sensor technologies are accessible and understandable for community members and so it's opened up this whole world of citizen science and what we call citizen sensing.

That's actually been demonstrated really nicely by one of our participant councils on the project, Lake Macquarie City Council, and they've done a whole citizen science project where they've brought schoolchildren in, members of the community and taught them how to build their own sensors, how to put those sensors out and start collecting data. This is a really important engagement exercise to help people not only understand about air quality as something that affects them, but it makes it real. That makes it tangible.

Claire Chaikin-Bryan:

So Lake Macquarie City Council has been working in the Internet of Space for a while, including looking at air quality and urban heat data. We've previously worked with UTS on projects around this and when the opportunity came up to be part of OPENAIR, we jumped at the opportunity because we thought we could expand on what we've done in the past but in a different way.

One of the big challenges in air quality monitoring, particularly when you're doing it at a low cost, is the data. Understanding the data is really important and the limitations of the data you get out of low-cost sensors. So that means the community needs to be well-educated when they look at the data from these sensors. And that's part of the reason why we don't just really to that we're running workshops with the community so that those who are building them understand where the data is coming from and the limitations of that data, but also so that they can then communicate that to others in the community, so they understand what's going on.

Now for this project with OPENAIR, we're really looking at empowering our community to be able to put air quality sensors where they're most interested in testing out air quality, whether it be at their home, at their local park, at their school, or at their local community centre. 

Andrew Tovey:

We think we've taken some of these topics to the next level with OPENAIR. We’re the first, I think to do such a complete and comprehensive range of topics all under one banner.

And I hope that the resources we produce from OPENAIR are picked up by practitioners and local governments, not just across Australia but around the world, and that they are really of value to everyone.