(WHBL) – While the Environmental Protection Agency last July declared all of Sheboygan County as having attained required clean air standards for low-level ozone, the American Lung Association’s just-released “State of the Air 2021” report says otherwise.
Overall, the study says that most of Wisconsin experienced better air quality with fewer unhealthy ozone days, and improvements in particle pollution when compared to the previous year’s report. And the report credits the federal Clean Air Act with allowing many Wisconsin cities like Green Bay, La Crosse and Duluth to be among those cleanest air. But Sheboygan and Milwaukee were presented as among the worst in the nation.
Sheboygan was listed in the report as the 23rd most polluted nationally, a single step of improvement from the previous year. A grade of “F” was assigned based on having 9 unhealthy ozone days per year, an average reached using data from 2017-2019. Milwaukee was ranked the 24th-worst in the report with 4.2 unhealthy days on average.
The report acknowledged that Chicago was to blame for much of the pollution here, delivered unimpeded over Lake Michigan. And while year-to-year improvements are seen, Angela Tin of the American Lung Association says that problems are likely to remain, driven mostly by vehicle emissions combined with what she said was “extreme heat as a result of climate change,” and that will put health and lives at risk.
The full report can be seen at https://www.lung.org/research/sota
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