“Get the Lead out!” Urban Lead Exposure Through Community Science: Lessons From the Newark Water Coalition

Abstract

This dissertation explores environmental lead exposure, focusing on the city of Newark, New Jersey. It follows a community-academic partnership formed with the Newark Water Coalition. Together, we formed a Mobile Lead Testing Unit to respond to the question “What are the current lead exposure sources in Newark”?. In Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, I outline the history of the project and contextualize it with the regulatory history of lead. In doing so, I highlight how community-based participatory work should be at the forefront of how we tackle lead exposure. Chapter 3 covers all of field measurements taken during the Mobile Lead Testing Unit campaign and explores intervariable relationships. The results provide a nuanced understanding of household lead exposure risks and reveal high lead levels in soil and dust. In Chapter 4, I use interviews and site observations to understand contemporary Newark stakeholder perspectives of lead exposure interventions and challenges. I also compare how community-based participatory research overlaps with achieving environmental justice principles. This dissertation highlights the significance of adopting a community-centered approach to understand exposure risks in vulnerable populations. It demonstrates how we can, and what we have left to do to, empower community and community-based organizations in developing and owning their own environmental inventories.