Daniel Mendoza brings science (and change) to the people.

Daniel Mendoza

A research associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah, Daniel Mendoza is not your typical academic scientist. With an impressive list of publications, averaging a new paper each month, academic scholarship is only one of his accomplishments. Mendoza has become an environmental social justice advocate, leveraging his research to get the attention of politicians and legislatures. The intersection between what’s happening in the atmosphere and what’s happening on the ground in people’s lives is where Mendoza readily enters.

This summer, Salt Lake has fallen victim to heat waves that mirror those throughout the United States. According to the CDC, extreme heat kills around a thousand people in the U.S. each year, more than any other natural-occurring factor. Effects from the heat are easily felt, but more insidious are the effects from increased concentrations of air pollutants, namely ozone. 

Mendoza explains in an interview with @theU’s Lisa Potter that “ozone is dangerous because it basically causes a sunburn in your lungs that impacts respiratory and cardiovascular health.”

In a recent study, Mendoza and his team asked the question, “can cool zones protect individuals from heat and poor air quality?” “Cool zones” are public buildings that serve as environmental refuges for vulnerable people during periods of extreme heat. Places like recreation centers or libraries are good examples of cool zones; Mendoza chose the Millcreek Library as the location for his case study. 

Obviously cool zones protect individuals from heat with the use of air conditioning, but the study found that the Millcreek Library also reduced exposure to atmospheric ozone by around 80%. 

Given their demonstrated efficacy, Mendoza is now critical of the current scope of cool zones. “We should be thinking about how to make these centers more accessible, for example, keeping them open for longer hours to protect people during the hottest parts of the day.” Many heat refuges close around 2-3 p.m. and aren’t open on weekends.

What people believe

Daniel Mendoza in the 2021 documentary "AWAiRE" that explores the impacts of air quality along the Wasatch Front. Credit: AWAIRE.

Mendoza understands that data alone is not convincing enough to enact change outside of the scientific community. “About 50% of people in the U.S. believe in climate change, but 100% believe in lung cancer, which is why I wanted to pivot from more climate drivers and greenhouse gas emissions and products towards more health criteria,” he says. Furthermore, he continues, “...150% of people believe in the dollar. I mean that’s ultimately what drives policy, what drives a lot of decision making.” 

It was during his Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Fellowship program at the U when Mendoza learned more about how to tie in the social and basic sciences with the health sciences. He finished the program in 2020 after completing a capstone project looking at the impact of air pollution on school absences. 

On “orange” or “red” air quality index (AQI) days, students are often still sent outside for recess, resulting in many children experiencing respiratory symptoms and needing to be sent home. Missing school every so often because the air quality is poor doesn’t sound like a huge issue, but it adds up to impact the student as well as the school, its district and the city where they live, he explains.

“When you have repeat absenteeism, then the potential to graduate is much lower, the potential to go to college is much lower, then your tax base is lower,” says Mendoza. Increased school absences cost the city around half a million dollars a year in terms of reduced workforce, education costs and healthcare costs. 

The solution to this pervasive issue of children being sent home because of the deleterious effects of bad air was surprisingly simple: emergency asthma inhalers in every classroom, right next to the Epinephrine Auto-Injectors branded “EpiPens” Says Mendoza, “I worked with Representative Mark Wheatley,” chair for the Utah Asthma Task Force, “and we passed a law…. Utah became the 14 (or 15th) state that has emergency asthma inhalers in every single school.” 

Now on bad air days, instead of sending a student home, students can use the rescue inhaler and remain at school, placing less of an economic burden on the city and giving themselves more time to learn. It’s a health-issue solution based on atmospheric data that changes policy and in turn saves taxpayer dollars. 

Empowering the Community 

Mendoza soon discovered what others had already discovered or at least suspected, that certain populations in the city were more endangered than others. What distinguished those populations was lower-income brackets and racial and ethnic inequities. When he first moved to Salt Lake City, Mendoza was excited about the buzz around air quality. “I thought, this is great. My research is going to be welcomed by the community,” he recalls. Instead, he discovered that these events were forgetting a key part of the problem: the people who are most impacted. 

Mendoza started attending community-based informational gatherings about climate change and the environment. “All of these events are held east of State Street. They were all in English. No one looked like me. Then at the end of the talk, the conclusion was ‘buy electric vehicles and solar panels and we’ll save the world together.’ Well that doesn’t work for everyone.” 

Not only is there a disparity in the communities affected by poor air quality, there is an inequality in accessible solutions to the problem. “For most of them, air quality is not a top priority… they don’t have the luxury of learning like we do,” says Mendoza of those who are most likely to be impacted by bad air quality. 

The first step in empowering the community and addressing this imbalance was to bring science to them. Mendoza began organizing outreach events, this time on the west side of State Street, held in both Spanish and English. 

“We provide them with actionable solutions. For example, we partnered with Utah Clean Energy, and we did an LED exchange where people bought in their normal light bulbs,” he says. Another switch he facilitated was to low-flow showerheads. 

And yet another initiative included furnace filter exchange with 100 homes in Salt Lake County. When indoor air was tested for 43 different potential problematic elements, researchers found elevated levels of uranium, lanthanides, arsenic and lead, “all the nasties.” 

Those “nasties” come from a variety of sources. “If you’re close to a highway, for example, you [breathe in] more of aluminum, associated with brake wear,” says Mendoza of the indoor air quality study, the first study of its kind. “When was the last time you sat outside for eight hours? You spend 90% of your time indoors and 60% of your time in your home, roughly speaking.” 

“The people that we really are very concerned about are, for example, the delivery drivers, who are constantly in that traffic, road construction workers as well. Those people are breathing [in] literally every single car’s tailpipe.” 

‘Run back inside’

Inequities in who breathes bad air requires that one looks closely at why and how bad air gets ingested. “Those with more and better resources can think about these issues involving bad air and what used to be only seasonal atmospheric inversions along the Wasatch Front, and then “just run back inside and we’re fine. But very few studies have been done on these concentrated pollution sources, again in conjunction with what they may be exposed to ‘naturally.’” 

From the 2021 documentary "AWAiRE." Credit: AWAIRE.

Those studies are being done by Mendoza and others and then made actionable on-the- ground initiatives involving switching out devices that are less effective and cost more money in populations who are most threatened by breathing bad air. 

These simple switches in affordable fixtures, for example, have tangible and meaningful impacts that inspire other actions, other policy decisions leading to better health outcomes. 

“Participants in these gatherings  soon became community leaders to help others improve their situation,” says Mendoza, another favorable result to his work. And then there is the financial incentive, that tongue-in-cheek statistic that 150% of people do in fact “believe in the dollar.” 

“These community members, they have to earn income to survive,” he reminds us. “They see their electric bills go down, they see their heating bills go down, they see their water bills go down, and they realize ‘Oh,okay, so it works. Let me tell all my friends about it.’”