Living in Kitchener for a year is equivalent to smoking 115 cigarettes, study finds

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The park known for its elegant swans and picture-perfect engagement backdrops is also home to Kitchener’s only provincial air quality monitoring system, and its findings might throw a bit of a wrench in that vision of pristine nature.

Breathing in the air in Kitchener for a year is the equivalent of smoking 115 cigarettes, a new study finds.

The findings, using data collected at Victoria Park, rank Kitchener as having the fourth-worst air quality among the 16 Canadian cities included in the study, trailing only Montreal at 124 cigarettes, Windsor at 123 cigarettes and Hamilton at 116 cigarettes.

The global study, conducted by the air quality improvement company HouseFresh using public data, ranked 101 capital cities around the world based on their measurements for PM 2.5 — fine particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less. The small size of these particles means they can get into the lungs and bloodstream, which can lead to various diseases in the people who breathe them in.

HouseFresh also then ranked air quality for major cities in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.

The cigarette formula, from the California-based environment data company Berkeley Earth, equates one cigarette to 22 micrograms of PM 2.5 per cubic metre.

It is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison — cigarette smokers also ingest a wide range of toxins and carcinogens with every puff. The study aims to give the average person a better understanding of the impact of air quality on their physical health.

The findings aren’t necessarily as bad as they sound for Canada.

On a global scale, Canada’s cities ranked among the world’s best in air quality.

The worst air quality can be found in developing economies in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa, according to the study, largely because of industrial sources like marine traffic and petrochemical production.

Living for a year in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the air quality is the worst in the world, was the equivalent of smoking 1,176 cigarettes in a year.

The best air quality in the world was in Bern, Switzerland, where air pollution translates to smoking just 11 cigarettes in a year.

Digging into Kitchener’s ranking

While Kitchener does rank fourth in Canada, many locations across southern Ontario are not far apart, said University of Waterloo chemical engineer professor Bill Anderson.

In fact, six cities in southern Ontario are among the 10 worst in Canada for air quality — Hamilton, Windsor, Kitchener, London, Mississauga and Toronto.

Southern Ontario has over 90 per cent of Ontario’s population, and roughly a third of Canada’s population. More people can mean poor air quality, especially since cars are the main way people get around in Ontario.

The Ontario data used in the study all comes from the province’s Air Quality Health Index. Daily particulate matter in Kitchener was 6.9 micrograms per cubic metre. In Toronto, with a score of 104 cigarettes per year, it was 6.3 micrograms per cubic metre.

“That difference is quite small, and quite likely within the ‘noise’ range of the data for the instruments they use to make the measurements,” said Anderson. “It would require some more in-depth statistical analysis to say whether Toronto’s PM 2.5 levels are really lower than Kitchener’s, or whether they are basically similar.”

While specific factors in a city will contribute to air quality — Montreal’s continued reliance on wood-burning stoves is a likely culprit for its higher ranking — all cities in southern Ontario face similar outside impacts.

“Southern Ontario tends to get air masses from the U.S. coming up, which brings along some PM 2.5,” said Anderson. “We’ve even seen impacts locally of forest fires on the Pacific coast some years.

“So the local air quality is a complex mix of local, regional and long-range factors at various times in the year.”

It’s important to keep the results in perspective. The Kitchener number represents smoking about six packs of cigarettes a year. A heavy pack-a-day smoker would smoke 365 packs in a year, and even a moderate smoker who goes through a pack a week would still smoke 52 packs a year.

“Of course, we know that smoking 115 cigarettes isn’t good for your health, but it’s nowhere close to the range of a regular smoker,” he said.

A push for more local data

The fact there’s only one provincial measuring station in the entire region, in Kitchener’s Victoria Park, may also distort things, says Wilfrid Laurier University chemistry professor Hind Al-Abadleh.

While it gives a general idea of local air quality, said Al-Abadleh, it is does not offer an exact picture of what’s happening throughout the region.

A station beside a major highway, heavy industry or a large construction site would have different readings than one in a park, next to a community garden, she said.

Toronto, by comparison, has four provincial stations, a mobile fleet of Environment Canada measurement stations, and consistent funding to the University of Toronto to deploy other mobile stations across the city.

Locally, Al-Abadleh launched a research project in 2020 to collect data on individual neighbourhoods, but she said funding for the project has run dry.

Her team installed a network of five multi-sensor air quality monitoring pods near schools in Kitchener close to high industrial and traffic emission sources.

A major finding, she said, was that the station closest to the highway had “statistically substantially higher PM 2.5 than the other sites.”

It’s not easy securing funding for any research project, but there may also be political hesitancy to collect this type of local information, Al-Abadleh said.

If air quality in certain neighbourhoods is consistently worse than others, she said, the results could uncover problems politicians may be unwilling or unable to address.

“If we have the data on certain neighbourhoods — maybe if they’re beside a prolonged construction site or high-traffic area — then you can make suggestions based on data, and not based on fear.”

The HouseFresh results are “an important reminder that everyone plays a role in improving air quality, including all levels of government and individuals,” Kitchener spokesperson Bethany Rowland said.

“While global, federal and provincial efforts to improve air quality are important, we’re also working at the local level to improve air quality in Kitchener,” she said. “Many of the actions we take across our community to support an energy transition in the fight against climate change will also benefit air quality.”

The city has more than 300 anti-idling signs at city facilities and schools, and it continues to take part in the region’s Clean Air Plan, originally developed in 1999.

Across Canada, the federal government’s Health Impacts of Air Pollution report estimates that 15,300 premature deaths each year are linked to air pollution, and that the social and economic consequences of illness and death associated with air pollution has an economic value of $120 billion per year.

While Kitchener’s air quality compares well on a global scale, its daily fine particulate levels are still above five micrograms per cubic metre, the threshold set out by the World Health Organization in 2021 for healthy air quality.

“I think the main takeaway here isn’t to be alarmist or try and scare anyone,” said Al-Abadleh.

“But it should be a bit of a wake-up call that we need to start collecting more data to be able to find ways to actively improve the situation locally.”