Quick Facts

According to John Hopkins Medicine, normal respiration rates for an adult person at rest range from 12 to 16 breaths per minute.

A 2017 study by researchers of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that low-level (below the National Ambient Air Quality Standards) long-term exposure to some pollutants are linked to increased mortality risk for older adults.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said this: "Although most emissions of ambient air pollution are from local or regional sources, under certain atmospheric conditions air pollution can travel long distances across national borders over time scales of 4-6 days, thereby affecting people far away from its original source."

The Clean Air Act (CAA) can be directly tied to two deadly air quality-related incidents that occurred in the forties and fifties. The federal statute was, therefore, created to manage air quality and was first enacted in 1963. More comprehensive versions of the Act, which have been administered by EPA, were passed in 1970 and in1990.

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) warns that "the excess cancer risk for people living adjacent to coal-tar, seal-coated pavement (1.1 cancer incidences for every 10,000 individuals exposed) was 38 times higher, on average (central tendency), than for people living adjacent to unsealed pavement." That's not two or three times higher, but 38. So, look around you.

Bottom line, coal-fired power plants have a huge footprint. According to an American Lung Association 2011 report, the plants are the largest producers of hazardous air pollutants. "The quantity is staggering," the association says. The plants are known to emit many of the 187 hazardous air pollutants listed in the Clean Air Act. And EPA collects detailed data on their sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides (NO2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and mercury, all of which are harmful to humans and the environment.

In May 2022, EPA's Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) Program ranked Illinois at 13 out of 56 states/territories nationwide for total toxic releases per square mile from TRI facilities.

As stated by a University of Illinois Researcher in 2021, “Twelve companies in various industries in Champaign-Urbana (CU) are TRI facilities, making the density of TRI facilities in CU per square mile more than 20 times higher than the Illinois state average."

1985 EPA study by its TEAM researchers of human exposure to air pollutants indicate that, on average, indoor levels of pollutants could be two to five times higher than those outdoors. Levels have also been known to be more than 100 times higher. And Americans spend spend about 90 percent of their time indoors.