People living in the shadow of Sarnia’s Chemical Valley have a new app at their fingertips to help report changes in what they smell and feel, and make sense of what chemical, or chemicals, might be responsible.

Pollution Reporter, part of The Land and the Refinery, a University of Toronto-based, Indigenous-led research project, was launched Saturday as Aamjiwnaang environmental activists hosted hundreds for a Toxic Tour of the refineries and chemical companies that hem in Aamjiwnaang First Nation.

The new app catalogues 70 chemicals emitted by Imperial Oil, self-reported by the refinery via the federal National Pollutant Release Inventory.

It connects those with known health harms based on peer-reviewed medical literature.

“It’s not a medical diagnosis, but it does give the community more accessible information,” said Reena Shadaan, one of the lab members with the project, led by Aamjiwnaang environmental activist Vanessa Gray and professor and University of Toronto Technoscience Research Unit director Michelle Murphy.

The chemical information and what it means for people’s’ health is publicly available, but was previously scattered and not easily accessible, Shadaan said.

A search function in the app let’s people pare down options if, for instance, the air smells like rotten eggs or window cleaner, she said.

The app also gives users an easier way to report incidents to Ontario’s Environment Ministry, said Gray, noting the current method involves a telephone call.

“It’s just not accessible for community members to be sitting on the phone with somebody in Toronto, say, in the middle of the night, whenever a spill happens, and to basically be doing their job for them, which is telling them what’s happening on the ground,” Gray said.

The app sends reports to the ministry’s email, creating a record, she said.

The app is focused on Imperial Oil – the largest and oldest refinery in Sarnia’s Chemical Valley – to start, but plans are to expand to others, Gray said.

The larger project, meanwhile, is also focused on Imperial since it’s the largest emitter in the Valley, Murphy said. The same National Pollutant Release Inventory data is used to show the cumulative effect of sustained chemical pollution.

A handful of tonnes of benzene – a carcinogen – for instance, are emitted from Imperial Oil per year, but over the course of 20 years it adds up to about 500 tonnes.

And that pollution – emitted amid other chemicals – moves around. It doesn’t stay in Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia, Murphy said.

“We need to have better ways of talking about this pollution than the way the government provides, which is chemical by chemical, year by year, one facility at a time, that breaks it down and minimizes what happens,” said Murphy, calling the status quo a “permission-to-pollute” system.

“It is a system designed to allow industries to pollute up to a certain amount,” she said. “The amounts and the standards set are way above the amounts in the United States typically, and each facility, if it can’t meet those amounts, is allowed to make its own special standard.”

The hope is the project – landandrefinery.org – opens eyes and helps inspire change, she said.

“We partially also want to change the narrative here in Canada about how people talk about environmental regulation,” she said. “It’s not just a matter of climate change; it’s a matter of colonialism.”

The Toxic Tour, meanwhile, held for several years before a health-related break in 2018, is mostly to acquaint people from outside the Sarnia area with what Sarnia’s Chemical Valley is.

“It’s still surprising that people as close as Toronto don’t understand that this is 40 per cent of Canada’s petrochemical industry in one area,” Gray said, “and the government continues to talk about reconciliation when these industries have been operating for over 100 years.”

Part of the revelation is also how close the industry is to Aamjiwnaang, she said.

“People who live here have seen it, know that it’s there,” she said, “but the tour just offers a little bit more information in depth of why and how we’re so close and so closely impacted by the industry.”

The bus and walking tour included locally sourced food, demonstrating the community’s perseverance, she said.

“We’re still trying to reclaim that inherent right to use the land here,” she said, calling it an ongoing process in need of help from outsiders. “It’s people in government, it’s Canadians that should feel responsible and do something about this.”

tkula@postmedia.com