Brisk Cambridge Air Filled With Pollutants

There’s something lurking behind Cambridge’s picturesque fall foliage: pollutants.

A study released earlier this month by Professor Daniel R. Faber of Northeastern University and Professor Eric J. Krieg of Johnson State College rated Cambridge as the fourth-worst city in Massachusetts in terms of total “environmental hazard points.”

“The research shows that...pollution is being concentrated in a few areas, one of which is Cambridge,” Faber said.

From 1990 to 2002, Faber and Krieg reported that 198,000 pounds of chemical toxins were released into the Cambridge environment. Of those, 92,000 pounds contained known carcinogens.

“There is this notion that Cambridge is a wealthy community and immune from some of these problems,” Faber said. “Often what we see is that this isn’t the case.”

In fact, he said, there are pockets of wealth and poverty within Cambridge.

Since minority and low-income communities often have less political clout to fight environmental hazards in their neighborhoods, the neighborhoods often contain polluted sites.

Faber said Cambridge’s large number of students and renters is another reason for the high concentration of pollution. He said these two groups are transitory and tend not to be active in local politics, which makes Cambridge a target for polluters.

But Michael F. Nakagawa, a board member of Alewife Neighbors Inc., a Cambridge community-action group, questioned some of the study’s findings.

“Cambridge is pretty clean,” he said.

Because Cambridge is very dense, Nakagawa said, the ranking is a result of unavoidable smaller violations, rather than a reflection of the presence of large toxic dumps.

He said residents should be more concerned with air pollution from vehicles alone, a topic the study did not address.

Faber said the report did not examine these air pollutants because Massachusetts does not release enough data on that subject.

Yet Nakagawa agreed that organizing Cambridge residents against a cause—like pollution—is often difficult.

“There are a lot of active people in Cambridge,” he said. “They’re active on so many different things that it’s hard to get people to spend the time on a particular issue.”

Faber said that, right now, the United States government tries to combat pollution by spreading it out over a large area.

“The solution isn’t just to ensure that all people are polluted equally,” he said. “But rather to move towards the reduction and use of toxic chemicals.”

Winkler Assistant Professor of Environmental Health and Risk Assessment at the Harvard School of Public Health Jonathan I. Levy ’93 said an analysis of the specific chemicals being released, and where they were going in Cambridge, was now necessary.

“Studies like this are important,” Levy said. “And, like any good study, it probably raises more questions than it answers, but it lays out some key issues that people need to grapple with.”