Show Notes
When Darren Riley moved to Detroit seven years ago, he didn’t expect the city’s air to change his life—literally. Developing asthma as an adult opened his eyes to a much larger problem: the invisible but pervasive impact of air pollution on the health of marginalized communities.
“I was fascinated on why don't we have the data that we need,” Riley recalls, “or why don't we have the infrastructure to really solve these issues, to understand where pollution is coming from, how's it impacting our communities so that we can really solve those problems and make an equitable breathing environment for everybody.
That personal reckoning sparked the idea for JustAir, a Michigan-based clean-tech startup building neighborhood-level air quality monitoring tools. The goal is simple but urgent: provide communities with access to hyper-local data so they can better manage pollution and protect public health. As Riley puts it, “JustAir is solving that problem of how do we better manage local pollution so that we can make sure that our communities, our lifestyle, where we work, where we play, where we learn, are really protected.”
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