Buffalo, NY

Built environment, Climate and environment | 2025

Measuring lead contamination in soil to reduce risks of exposure and help residents advocate for remediation.

Buffalo’s East Side, a predominantly African American community, bears the burden of systemic environmental injustices, including exposure to lead-contaminated soil. The neighborhood is downwind of a lead smelter that operated in the first half of the 20th century. Soil testing and remediation have been conducted upwind of the smelter, though not downwind. Yet, preliminary testing has revealed that over 80 percent of sampled properties on the East Side contain more than double the EPA’s lead-screening threshold of 200 ppm in the soil. Open Buffalo, a civic initiative focused on improving equity and justice, will train residents to join their soil sampling project in the Delavan Grider neighborhood and develop immediate risk-exposure strategies and long-term advocacy plans to remediate lead contamination.

Partnering with Citizen Science Community Resources, the University at Buffalo, and the Massachusetts Avenue Project, Open Buffalo will conduct targeted soil sampling and train residents and students in scientific sampling techniques that use EPA-approved methods. Residents can serve with an advisory committee for the project, help sample their own properties, and engage in collective discussions of the findings to generate community-driven solutions. Open Buffalo will also document the neighborhood’s historical knowledge about industrial activities, previous remediation efforts, and observed health concerns to complement the scientific data and inform analyses. To answer community-identified needs and questions, the project team will create maps and general educational materials contextualizing contamination in relation to historical manufacturing locations and wind patterns and identifying priority areas for further remediation. Open Buffalo will use their analyses to generate policy briefs that translate contamination data into actionable recommendations.

Open Buffalo will share findings, which they expect will reveal gaps in remediation, with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to prompt a reassessment of past efforts and inform future ones. The project also anticipates findings will be used by Delavan-Grider residents to reduce their own exposure and advocate for remediation, the Buffalo Urban Development Corporation in planning its Northland Beltline Corridor Brownfield Opportunity Area, and the region’s Lead Safe Task Force in developing strategies to reduce lead exposure.