LaTricea Adams' parents and grandparents all grew up in Riverside, a neighborhood in south Memphis.

“This neighborhood is a historically and currently majority African American community,” LaTricea Adams, a resident of Memphis, said. "As you are about to enter into the Riverside community, you know it because you can smell it.”

Adams is also the CEO of Black Millennials for Flint, an organization focused on seeking environmental justice for lead-free African American & Latino communities.

Neighbors who live near manufacturing and chemical plants, highways and train tracks have worried about their health for decades.

Shelby County, where Memphis is located, received an "F” in the American Lung Association’s State of the Air 2022 report for ozone levels multiple years in a row. They’ve passed in the particle pollution category since the mid-2000s but repeatedly failed before then.

“The most polluted area in Memphis is southwest Memphis. There used to be a monitoring station,” Chunrong Jia, an air pollution researcher and associate professor at the University of Memphis School of Public Health, said.

Jia is a researcher who focuses on air pollution exposure and risk assessment. He collects chemicals in the air on this rooftop monitoring station, and then takes the tubes and analyzes the chemicals.

“Each peak represents a chemical,” he explained, pointing to the analysis on the computer screen. “For example, one peak represents benzene which is a carcinogenic chemical in the air, it’s ubiquitous, it’s an ingredient of gasoline and diesel.”

New funding could change the data collected on these pollutants. The recently signed Inflation Reduction Act provides $3 billion in funding for environmental and climate justice block grants, and $236 million will go toward increased air pollution monitoring, intended to benefit disadvantaged communities.

“There are two groups of air pollutants we often see in the area,” Jia said.

The first is criteria air pollutants. Jia said these include seven pollutants, like lead and particulate matter. Ground-level ozone is also included. The EPA says these pollutants can harm your health and the environment.

The second group is toxic air pollutants. Jia says this is a larger group of chemicals, and includes gasses like benzene.

“They are emitted from different industrial processes and often those low-income communities are by these air toxins because they are close to those industrial facilities,” Jia explained. "Studies have found that even at low concentrations, our exposure to low-level complex mixtures of these chemicals still can cause adverse health effects.”

The State of the Air 2021 report also found that more than 4 in 10 people in the U.S. live with polluted air, putting their health at risk. More data on what’s in the air could help researchers find more answers to how this impacts us and the environment.

“Where's the data,” Andrea Jacobo, a visiting assistant professor at Rhodes College and doctor of public health candidate, said. “It gives us the data we need to advocate for our communities to change the infrastructure."

Jia said he sees the funding providing multiple benefits, from strengthening current monitoring efforts to providing monitoring in areas that don’t currently have it.

“In particular those under-served communities, often they are located near those industrial facilities or highways or polluted dumping sites,” Jia said.

“We know that our communities are polluted. The next step is how do we address the chronic illness that comes from these pollutants that we see,” Adams said.

For years, fracking has been a hot topic of debate in the United States.

The process works by drilling deep below the earth’s surface and extracting gas by injecting a high-pressure water mixture that is directed at rock.

When done properly, fracking is roughly 50% more environmentally friendly than using traditional coal, but if the operation is not “tight,” some of the natural gas, such as methane, can leak out into the environment and cause harm.

Supporters think fracking is good for the economy as it secures cleaner-burning energy for the United State to use, while opponents believe the environmental questions outweigh economic benefits.

This is all to say that research surrounding the environmental impacts of fracking is not yet fully understood, which is why researchers gathered in Broomfield, Colorado to study the process more.

Armed with state-of-the-art equipment, researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Maryland spent a week flying above fracking sites in Weld County, Colorado to gather data surrounding possible methane leaks around fracking sites.

Because methane can come from a multitude of sources such as land use, landfills, and animals, the equipment on board was looking for the chemical compound ethane, a short-lived gas that is only emitted with methane when that methane comes from fracking.

“Being able to delineate this in real-time with fast measurements in the order of one second is really important,” said Alan Fried, a researcher at the University of Colorado. “It’s important to our immediate health. I know there’s major concerns about what we’re breathing from fracking operations and they’re still trying to study some of the long-term effects of some of the emissions, but even if you’re relatively healthy going out and exercising on a high-pollution day, where there are a lot of precursors that produce ozone, could be detrimental.”

The data the teams collect will be sent to local health departments to determine how much methane is possibly leaked from fracking sites. The health departments will then use that information to assess whether stronger measures surrounding fracking legislation are needed to improve air quality.

“We think of using natural gas as a bridge fuel. What that means is it’s a cleaner-burning fossil fuel so we can move away from dirtier fuels, like coal for instance, but for that to have a positive impact on our climate, it has to be very tight, so there can’t be a lot of methane leaking out of oil and gas operations,” said Abigail Koss, an application scientist who is helping with the research.

Most fracking companies defend the safety of the practice, saying it is cleaner than coal and does not contaminate drinking water as some claim.