They grew up breathing Detroit air. Generations of women are pushing for new approaches to pollution.

DETROIT — Joyce Collins has buried nearly her entire immediate family.

Her father died in 1992 after cancer spread to his bones. Her oldest sister was diagnosed with lung cancer, later developed breast and brain cancer, and died in 2013. Another sister died from pancreatic cancer in 2007. Her mother died from colon cancer in 2020.

Now Collins’ 53-year-old nephew has prostate cancer.

Collins, 67, grew up around Southwest Detroit’s 48217 ZIP code, a predominantly Black and Latino community surrounded by some of Southeast Michigan’s heaviest industry. The Marathon Petroleum refinery operates there. Nearby River Rouge and Ecorse are also home to heavy industry. Families live among refineries, industrial facilities and major freight corridors with heavy truck traffic.

For decades, residents have asked what all of that pollution is doing to their health.

Women and girls across generations are pushing for an answer. Collins still shows up to neighborhood meetings, stays engaged in conversations about pollution and speaks openly about what families have endured. She has become one of the residents pushing for greater attention to the health and environmental burden surrounding their neighborhoods. At the same time, young people like 12-year-old Nala Hill are being trained to advocate for cleaner air. 

Detroit is working to control industrial truck traffic and airborne dust, the state is funding air-quality improvements inside residents’ homes, and community organizations are monitoring pollution and training young people to advocate for cleaner air.

On top of those efforts, key women in state and local government are also pressing for policy to address the cumulative pollution. While current efforts can reduce some of the exposure families face now, they do not resolve the larger question of how much additional pollution Michigan should allow in communities already carrying so much.

In Southwest Detroit, the pollution surrounding families does not come from one source. But Michigan’s permitting system largely still looks at it that way.

A refinery may be reviewed under one permit. Industrial dust falls under another set of rules. Truck emissions are dealt with elsewhere. No one fully weighs what all of those sources add up to in a community already carrying a heavy environmental burden.

New Jersey faced the same fight and changed its permitting system.

Now, regulators must consider what a community is already carrying before allowing certain facilities to open or expand there. In overburdened neighborhoods, that gives the state more power to require stronger protections and limit additional pollution.

Other states have followed suit: New York and Minnesota have both passed robust statutes that block or heavily restrict new permits if they add to the pollution load in already disadvantaged communities. Additionally, states like Colorado, Connecticut and Massachusetts have successfully codified frameworks that mandate cumulative health and environmental assessments before industrial operations can expand near vulnerable populations.

New Jersey state Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Ruiz, a Democrat and co-sponsor of the bill, said the environmental justice law took years to pass.

“As this bill gained traction, community members came together to share deeply personal stories of children living with asthma and families unable to enjoy their own backyards because of pollution,” Ruiz said.

She said building a broad coalition around those experiences, backed by data, was critical. New Jersey had to confront a history in which policy repeatedly allowed polluting industries to concentrate in the same places, Ruiz said.

“Undoing decades of policy that worked in polluters’ favor and treated overburdened communities as dumping grounds and an opportunity for industry required years of persistent activism from residents, advocates and policymakers,” Ruiz said.

“Momentum grew in New Jersey because the conversation never lost sight of the humanity behind environmental justice.”

New Jersey state Sen. Troy Singleton, a Democrat and primary author of the law, said the issue belongs inside the broader national conversation about racial and economic inequality.

“For far too long, where someone lives has too often determined the quality of the air they breathe, the water they drink and the environment they raise their families in,” Singleton said. 

“This is not simply an environmental issue,” he said. “It is a matter of public health, economic fairness, and social justice.”

Singleton said the national racial-justice protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020 helped create momentum for legislation that advocates had spent years building.

Three months after then-Gov. Phil Murphy, also a Democrat, publicly backed the legislation on Juneteenth 2020, New Jersey enacted the law. 

Its implementing rules took effect in 2023.

New Jersey’s rules now require applicants for certain facilities in overburdened communities to examine existing environmental and public-health stressors. The state can require additional pollution controls and community protections, and new facilities that would create disproportionate impacts face stricter barriers.

Ruiz said the law is already changing what facilities must do before receiving permits.

“Other states like Michigan can learn from New Jersey’s approach that while strong laws provide an important framework for protecting communities, their effectiveness depends on timely implementation and on sustained vigilance, advocacy, and partnership to ensure that new protections are upheld.”

Democratic state Sen. Stephanie Chang has spent years pushing for state policy aimed at reducing the pollution burden in Southwest Detroit and other heavily industrialized communities.

She pointed to 48217, the Marathon refinery and the cluster of other industrial facilities in and around Southwest Detroit as a public health concern, particularly for residents with asthma, COPD and other respiratory illnesses.

Marathon Petroleum did not respond to The 19th’s request for comment.

But Chang said getting legislation through Lansing has been difficult.

“We have bills that we’ve pushed forward that unfortunately have not made a lot of progress,” she told The 19th.

One of them is the Protecting Overburdened Communities Act, or POCA, which Chang and state Rep. Donavan McKinney, a fellow Detroit Democrat, introduced in 2025, drawing from New Jersey’s approach. The legislation would require the state to consider cumulative environmental impacts when reviewing certain permits in overburdened communities. McKinney, now the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, would represent 48217 in Congress if he wins the November general election.

Opponents argue that the legislation would lead to administrative backlogs. Industry groups warn that restricting development in industrialized zones will stifle economic growth, causing businesses to relocate to states with more favorable regulations.

For Chang, the proposed legislation means regulators would have to look beyond what a single facility is proposing and consider what residents are already exposed to from the industries around them.

“When you look at areas like 48217 or other areas like on the east side, it’s important to consider the cumulative impact between multiple sources and also between multiple types of pollutants,” Chang said.

She also worked on legislation that would have created a state air quality enforcement and mitigation fund. Instead of pollution fines simply going to the state, Chang said the goal was “to redirect those fines back to impacted communities.”

That bill made it further but died on the House floor.

From inside state government, Regina Strong sees why residents can become frustrated when another permit moves forward in a community already surrounded by pollution.

Strong is Michigan’s first environmental justice public advocate and heads the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) office charged with elevating environmental justice concerns.

She said state regulators are still limited by existing laws. They can monitor pollution, use environmental justice screening tools and require protections where existing rules allow them. But they cannot independently create a cumulative-impact standard that lawmakers have not enacted.

“If they fulfill all of these things that the law says they have to do,” Strong said of regulated companies, “it becomes a, how could it not be approved?”

Changing that, she said, means changing the legal framework.

Strong said versions of cumulative-impact legislation have surfaced repeatedly during her more than seven years working in the state environmental justice office.

“It really is the long game, unfortunately,” she said.

Detroit City Council Member Gabriela Santiago-Romero said residents are still fighting environmental threats piece by piece.

Santiago-Romero represents Detroit’s District 6, which includes the 48217 ZIP code and much of Southwest Detroit.

“It seems like a lot of elected officials do not care that we have people that are dying of weird throat cancers and mouth cancers and asthma,” Santiago-Romero said.

Her office is trying to address one contributor: industrial truck traffic, much of it tied to the Ambassador Bridge, the busy international crossing connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, and carrying commercial freight between the United States and Canada.

Santiago-Romero said Detroit has been working to create and codify truck routes to keep heavy vehicles away from residential streets. The work is complicated because roads throughout the area are controlled by different levels of government.

“We have an accumulation of pollution in our neighborhoods,” she said. “Not just Marathon, not just the Ambassador Bridge and heavy materials and waste. It’s also the trucks that are in our neighborhood.”

“And frankly,” she said, “it is a lot.”

Detroit has also adopted a fugitive dust ordinance, a local law aimed at reducing airborne dust from construction sites, scrap yards and other industrial operations. It requires certain businesses to create and follow dust-control plans so particulate pollution is less likely to drift into nearby neighborhoods, but Santiago-Romero said enforcement has been uneven.

“I feel like no matter what is passed by law, it’s not enforced,” she said. 

At the state-wide level, state Sen. Erika Geiss, whose district includes River Rouge and Ecorse, introduced a bill in June to address fugitive dust from bulk solid-material facilities. The legislation would require dust-control measures and real-time particulate monitoring. 

It was referred to the state Senate’s Natural Resources and Agriculture Committee on June 11 and has not advanced further.

These policies address real sources of pollution — and also illustrate the broader dynamic: One law addresses trucks. Another addresses fugitive dust. Another permit governs an industrial facility.

Strong said Michigan has tried to address some of the immediate harm through its Environmental Justice Impact Grant program. In 2024, $20 million went to 43 grantees. Three of them, Strong said, are based in 48217 or directly benefit residents there.

The investments are focused heavily on what happens inside people’s homes.

Strong said a grant to Bridging Communities is helping seniors improve indoor air quality and providing tools residents can use to better protect themselves. EGLE’s grant records say the project will collect air-quality data, provide air-cleaning equipment and offer education to older adults in the 48217 area. 

Another grant for upgrades to 10 Southwest Detroit homes went to EcoWorks, a Detroit nonprofit focused on sustainability, green building and energy education. The homes will get  solar panels, improved air systems, mold remediation, sump pumps and electric appliances. 

Strong described the work as “very personal to the people who live in the community,” including sump pumps for homes that have flooded, replacing gas appliances with electric ones, solar panels and better air-filtration systems.

“It’s a really important piece of how we can both have impact on individuals in the community while we work on the bigger policy pieces and the bigger pieces that are going to impact everybody,” Strong said. 

Strong said the third project also centers older residents, combining health education with improvements meant to keep outside pollution from entering homes.

That project, through St. Patrick Senior Center, will upgrade HVAC systems and provide health education to more than 300 Southwest Detroit seniors, according to EGLE. 

The communities themselves have also spent years trying to build protections outside government.

The Rev. Alex Hill has been involved in environmental justice work around 48217 for nearly three decades from inside New Mt. Hermon Missionary Baptist Church.

“There’s not a family in my church that has not been affected” by cancer, he said.

Years ago, Hill said, New Mt. Hermon helped environmental activist Rhonda Anderson with a door-to-door effort asking residents whether someone in their household had died from cancer. Flags were placed outside homes that reported a death.

Hill said nearly every house canvassed in parts of 48217 and neighboring 48218 had a flag.

The canvass was not an epidemiological cancer study. It did not establish causation or determine whether cancer rates in the community were statistically higher than expected.

But the flags remain part of how residents describe years of illness around them.

And they help explain why Democratic lawmakers in Michigan have been pushing the state to look beyond pollution one permit at a time.

New Mt. Hermon has provided space for organizing and has operated an air-monitoring system behind the church for roughly eight years. Hill and other activists have participated in toxic tours that take residents and visitors past industrial facilities surrounding Southwest Detroit, River Rouge and Ecorse.

Now Hill and Tri-City Community Development Corporation are working toward an even larger project.

On six acres near the church where the former Mark Twain Elementary School once stood, the organization has plans for a green space known as Eden Park.

Hill envisions trees, greenery and other tools that could help reduce pollution exposure. His plans also include mechanical trees, technology intended to capture carbon dioxide, that he hopes could eventually be used throughout surrounding communities.

Hill is under no illusion that community projects alone can erase decades of industry.

“The industries are not going anywhere,” he said. “That’s just a fact.”

But he also knows many residents cannot simply leave.

“The people in the community, most of them can’t afford to go nowhere,” Hill said.

This summer, Hill’s nonprofit organization, TriCity CDC, added another piece to its environmental work: teaching young people how to advocate for themselves. Its first Environmental Justice Youth Ambassadors cohort graduated this month, including 25 young people from Southwest Detroit, River Rouge and Ecorse.

Hill said participants spent roughly six to eight months learning about environmental justice, taking toxic tours, developing projects and presenting possible solutions. Those completing the program receive $1,000 stipends.

Among them is Hill’s 12-year-old granddaughter, Nala Hill.

“When we went on our first toxic tour, it really opened my eyes to see what was going on and how much every company was polluting our area and what we’re living in,” Nala said.

She said learning about the neighborhood made her want to become more involved.

“We can fight even more once you know about it,” she said.

Collins, 67, remembers her childhood in a community where neighbors knew one another and families looked out for each other. She remembers something else, too: waking up to orange dust settled across the cars outside.

“We as a people, we have to start standing up,” Collins said. “Somebody has to start saying something, for our children. For our children’s sake.”

In Southwest Detroit, some of those children, like Nala, are already learning how.