As Carbon County, Pennsylvania is an area home to various coal mining efforts, there would be no surprise that the region faces air pollution and air quality issues. It is likely that the vast amount of natural land preserved for recreation helps naturally filter these pollutants and protect the county residents through ecosystem services that are not easily measured. The US Clean Air Act requires monitoring and standards for criteria pollutants including ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, lead, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. In the past month, Carbon County has seen short term exposure to particulate matter 2.5 shown in Figure 1., which has health effects related to this exposure including respiratory symptoms, adverse cardiovascular system effects, inflammatory lung reactions and increased hospital admissions1. According to Breezometer, Carbon County faces long term exposure to particulate matter 2.5 seen in Figure 2., which can cause health effects such as reduced lung function, increased chronic bronchitis, and increased lung cancer and cardiopulmonary mortality1. Exposure to these conditions can cause increased health risks after a year’s time, with risks increasing as exposure time increases.
Just across the Carbon County border is the Panther Creek power plant, which burns coal waste to generate electricity4. The Stronghold Digital Mining, Inc. is a cryptocurrency mining operation that acquired and now runs out of the Panther Creek power plant. This past summer, the mining company submitted a proposal to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) to use a tire derived fuel at the plant to generate electricity for the computers of the cryptocurrency mine. They requested to add 15% of shredded tires to their coal waste, which led to Carbon county residents urging DEP and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deny this request4. The power plant provides more than one third of their energy output to the electricity for cryptocurrency computers, and the rest supplies some residents with utility use. Panther Creek is permitted as an electricity utility steam generating unit, while it could be permitted as a solid waste incinerator which tests for heavy metals and other toxins, especially since more than one third of its energy is not going to residents, and is going to cryptocurrency4.
This poses a few particular challenges. The area surrounding the power plant is not of high income, and 36% of the population lives below the federal poverty line4. The people living there have little power against the cryptocurrency corporation. The Panther Creek plant has committed at least seven air pollution violations, many of them occurring after the mining company took control of the plant, and they do not currently monitor for polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), a known carcinogen which would be emitted if they burned tire derived fuel. There are many stakeholders involved in the issue of the power plant wanting to add tire parts to their coal waste burning. These include the residents of the surrounding counties, Carbon and Schuylkill, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Environmental Protection Agency as they are the monitoring agencies, the plant and company owners as the regulations impact their business, and the organizations working to spread awareness to the issue such as Save Carbon County mentioned in the article by PA Environment Digest.
Other challenges relating to air pollution and sustainability in Carbon County include the lack of available data and records on air quality. The area is such a small region that there is little tracking and coverage to measure these present issues. Another concern is that the area is so small and still thrives on a post industrial revolution economy. This seems to set the population back in efforts of sustainability, as the economy thrives off of tourism which is attracted by the natural resources and recreation, therefore they should consider the importance of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change issues. The stakeholders pertaining to these issues are residents with little access to information on their area, agencies who are to monitor the quality of the area, businesses that operate in the region, and healthcare providers that care for people who get sick in the region.
One of Carbon County’s sustainable solutions to an air quality problem started underway in the 1990s. The New Jersey Zinc Company relocated to Pennsylvania and built the borough of Palmerton for its workers in the early 1900s. During this time, there was little regulation or monitoring requirements for industrial facilities, and even less technology to minimize this pollution2. After about eighty years of operation, the area surrounding the zinc smelting plant had faced harsh effects of the emissions. The EPA established the region as one of the nation’s first Superfund sites, which receives federal funding for environmental restoration. Today, the Lehigh Gap Nature Center (LGNC) is the only environmental education center created from a Superfund site in the country. This recreational hotspot includes a classroom and environmental laboratory on the 756 acre refuge that receives thousands of visitors every year. To restore the land, they used experimental testing plots with grasses, fertilizer, crushed limestone and compost. Mixes of twelve native prairie grasses were seeded with crop dusters in 2006. Since then, hundreds of animal, fungi, plant and bacteria species have been documented in the Lehigh Gap Wildlife Refuge. The barriers limiting success of solutions of this kind are extreme environmental harm from past actions that reduce the ability to plant certain species as they can spread toxins into the food chain.
Another potentially sustainable solution to combating air pollution is the use of public transportation. Carbon County offers LANTA bus and van services through Carbon Transit3. Though the resource is there, the routes are not suitable for transportation to common work or school hours, and do not extend beyond county locations. The success of public transportation in small rural communities is limited by barriers such as availability of transportation workers combined with the low use of the resource that decrease the accessibility of the efforts.
A successful solution that could alleviate air pollution created by the Panther Creek power plant would include government regulation and legislation. The low income community requires the help of government agencies to prevent the plant from causing further harm to the environment. These could include re-permitting the plant, limiting and closely monitoring their emissions, and requiring them to compensate for their damage by establishing beneficial initiatives. The barriers to these kinds of actions are typically corporate control of politicians, lack of environmental and social concern by corporations, and a lack of power by the affected peoples.
The efforts of LGNC could be deemed sustainable by our definition of sustainability as they seek to preserve natural systems, develop and promote equitable opportunities, and strengthen environmental justice efforts. The use of public transportation in the county could improve on sustainability by aiming to better suit the people who need it most. The Panther Creek power plant could implement sustainability by reducing their pollution or finding an alternative to fossil fuels, promote economic development by contributing to the local economy, and acknowledge the harm caused by their operation to the environment and residents of the area with efforts to reduce the previously mentioned problems. A variety of assets pertaining to Carbon County sustainability can be viewed at the map here.
Bibliography
1n.d. Explore Historical Air Quality Levels at Your Location – BreezoMeter. Accessed February 21, 2024. https://www.breezometer.com/air-quality-map/air-quality/exposure.
2n.d. Lehigh Gap Nature Center – Conservation, Education, and Research. Accessed February 21, 2024. https://lgnc.org/.
3“CT Bus – Carbon Transit.” n.d. Carbon Transit. Accessed February 21, 2024. https://carbontransit.com/ct-bus/.
4Hess, David E. 2023. “PA Environment Digest.” PA Environment Digest, December 18, 2023. http://www.paenvironmentdigest.com/newsletter/default.asp?NewsletterArticleID=59493&SubjectID=.