By Aisha Dow
I can hear the twittering of birds and the rustling of leaves in the Gleditsia trees as I walk down the street towards my local cafe. I’m meeting a neighbour for an interview for this column.
Most of the time I feel lucky to live where I do. It’s close to Melbourne’s CBD, has good access to trains and well-regarded local schools. It’s the type of place where neighbours mow each other’s front lawns and lost things – wallets, keys, dogs – find their way home
But there’s a catch.
Trucks on residential streets in Yarraville, Melbourne.Credit: Paul Jeffers
As I get closer to the main road, there are new sounds. The bump-bump noise of B-double trailers. A rattle of chains. The hiss of air brakes.
About 2000 trucks traverse the two-lane road each day, Yarraville resident Glen Yates tells me.
“I’m not sure if you’re aware, but almost half of those shipping containers going backwards and forwards up here are actually empty,” he says. ”They use them for ballast on ships that don’t have enough cargo.“
Glen Yates, who has been campaigning for better air quality in Melbourne’s west.Credit: Jason South
The cafe we are in is on the road where my four-year-old children are likely to go to primary school.
I feel a bit sheepish about this meeting. In my mind, Yates is a local community hero. He runs a network of air monitoring stations and, along with others, has been advocating for improved air quality in the west.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to work out whether the pollution caused by the truck corridors and industry is significant enough for me to reconsider living here.
How bad is air pollution for you?
Clare Walter, an honorary research fellow at the University of Melbourne whose work focuses on air pollution, says she has also wrestled with the location of her home and the likely impact on her family’s health.
The issue had come to a head when she was working as an oncology pharmacist at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and began noticing that there were patients of a similar age to her – in their 30s – who had lung cancer yet no history of smoking.
Around the same time, her local kindergarten closed and the only other local option was to send her daughter to a centre that backed onto Hoddle Street in Collingwood, a choked 10-lane thoroughfare. Soon her little one was wheezing through the night and would go on to develop asthma and allergies to numerous airborne substances.
Though Australia generally fares very well on a global scale when it comes to air quality – on Wednesday the air in Sydney was rated about 43 times safer than the hazardous smog in Lahore, Pakistan – modelling Walter helped lead estimated that traffic pollution caused more than 11,100 premature deaths in Australia annually and tens of thousands of cases of asthma.
Hoddle Street in Melbourne.Credit: Angela Wylie
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare also estimates that PM2.5 particles – commonly caused by cars, trucks and bushfires, among other things – are linked to thousands of Australian deaths each year from coronary heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (a common lung disease) and lung cancer. PM2.5 particles are invisible to the naked eye and can get deeper into the lungs, or into the blood.
Some childcare centres in my neighbourhood are on truck thoroughfares, even though early life exposure to tiny particulate matter has been linked to asthma onset and, in one 2020 study, poorer English and maths scores in primary school students.
The WHO air quality guidelines recommend that daily PM2.5 concentrations should not exceed an average of 15 micrograms per cubic metre more than three or four times a year. Yates told me that an air quality monitor at the local school recently showed six hours when the PM2.5 level exceeded 60 micrograms per cubic metre.
For Walter, the final straw that solidified her move from Collingwood to one of Melbourne’s traditional leafy suburbs was when the government proposed a new freeway in her area, the since-scrapped East West Link. It would have included a new ramp next to the childcare centre.
The East West Link was controversial among the community.Credit: Robert Prezioso
After moving east and getting a spot in a childcare centre flanked by two parks, Walter says her daughter’s asthma drastically improved from nightly wheezing to flare-ups only a couple of times a year.
Could your home be in a pollution hotspot?
My neighbourhood in Melbourne’s inner west has a well-publicised issue with truck pollution. Sandwiched between Melbourne’s city port, shipping container parks and other industrial enterprises, one resident group recently declared they were “sick and tired of being the city’s dumping ground”. The West Gate Tunnel being constructed in the area has promised to take trucks off select local roads (including one that runs past our local school), though traffic will increase on others.
Associate Professor Robyn Schofield, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Melbourne, explains it’s not just proximity to major roads that causes a hazard. Other locations where people are vulnerable to air pollution include under flight paths, near ship stack emissions or close to heavy industry including coal power stations, refineries and paper mills.
Planes are also responsible for emissions that cause a hazard to human health.Credit: iStock
Schofield says a large amount of pollution is also caused by domestic wood fires. The NSW Office of Environment and Heritage estimates that in some towns and cities in the state, on a winter weekend, wood-burning heaters may be responsible for more than 60 per cent of fine particle pollution.
To move or not to move?
Yates, who suffers from asthma and high blood pressure, conditions associated with poor air quality, has no plans to leave his Yarraville home. There’s almost everything his family needs nearby. He also has a system in place to mitigate the impact of air pollution until he hopes the situation is improved when trucks are permanently banned from Somerville Road, a few metres from his home.
When he sees pollution levels elevate, he will close the windows and doors and turn off the ducted heating-cooling system that would otherwise pull in air from outside. Yates also has several air purifiers in his home with HEPA filters.
Glen Yates uses air purifiers to improve the quality of the air at home.
But many people who live in more polluted areas don’t have that luxury.
Marion Terrill, the transport and cities program director at the Grattan Institute, says there are many things authorities could do to improve air quality in residential areas, such as locking out old and dirty trucks.
“An old truck emits 60 times more particulate matter than a truck sold after 2011, and about eight times as much nitrogen oxide,” she says.
Yates says he would like to see authorities introduce an alert system – similar to those for thunderstorm asthma or floods – warning the public when the air quality deteriorates to the point it could trigger respiratory issues. This could mean that schools would know to keep children inside.
No-idling legislation was also suggested by several people I interviewed, which would stop parents from leaving their engines running as they waited outside schools, for example.
So, has any of this made me feel any clearer about whether we should attempt a move for better air quality?
I do feel like I have a better understanding of this invisible hazard and am better prepared to avoid it where I can. But it remains a black mark on my otherwise wonderful neighbourhood, where any permanent and equitable solutions will be as a result of government action.
“One of the things I was really struck by doing the research on air pollution was that every time the World Health Organisation or other authorities put out new [air quality] guidelines they would say, ‘Oh, it’s worse than we thought before,’” Terrill says.
“So it seems like every time we learn something new, it’s more worrying.”
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