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When we think about air pollution, most of us picture smokestacks or wildfire haze. But in the Copper Country, much of the air our children breathe from November to April is indoor air. Over a school year, a student spends more than 1,000 hours inside school buildings, and what is in that air deserves more attention than it gets.
Chemicals we can’t see
Indoor spaces collect chemicals that slowly escape from everyday materials and settle into air and dust. They include flame retardants in furniture and electronics, plasticizers called phthalates in flooring and vinyl, pesticides, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which form whenever wood, fuel or other materials burn. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies several PAHs as probable human carcinogens.
Children are more vulnerable than adults. For their size, they breathe more air and have more skin surface, they spend more time near the floor, and their bodies are still developing.
Life up here adds to the picture. Long heating seasons with windows shut, older school buildings, wood heat, and episodes of poor outdoor air. In July 2025, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy issued a fine-particle air quality alert for much of the Upper Peninsula and asked residents to cut back on wood burning.
A wristband that “listens” to the air
One promising way to study these exposures is surprisingly ordinary, a silicone wristband, like the ones handed out at fundraisers. In 2014, researchers at Oregon State University showed that silicone soaks up a wide range of these chemicals from the air and skin around the wearer. After a week of wear, a laboratory can measure many compounds from a single band, with no needles, pumps or batteries. At Michigan Tech’s BioAnalytical Chemistry Laboratory, where I work, we prepare and analyze these wristbands.
Studies elsewhere hint at why school matters. In California, preschoolers wore one band only at child care and another all week, and the results suggested that some pesticide exposure at the centers came from different sources than exposure at home. A 2025 study in southern China found that children’s exposure to a family of flame retardants was roughly four to five times higher at school than at home.
What we still don’t know
A wristband shows who was exposed more, but not yet how much entered the body, so results can’t be compared directly with health guidelines. And as far as I can find, no wristband study has yet focused on K-12 classrooms in the United States, let alone rural northern schools like ours.
What families and schools can do now
You don’t need a laboratory to lower children’s exposure. Many of these steps come from EPA’s Indoor Air Quality Tools for Schools program:
· Keep the air moving. Change HVAC filters on schedule and make sure ventilation brings in fresh air. Inexpensive carbon dioxide monitors show whether a room is well ventilated.
· Control dust. Wet mopping, damp dusting and HEPA vacuums remove dust that carries many of these chemicals.
· Wash hands before eating. Chemicals in dust stick to hands and reach young children through hand-to-mouth contact.
· Stop idling. Keep buses and cars from idling near school entrances and air intakes.
· Choose products carefully. Use low-emission cleaning products and integrated pest management.
· Watch the forecast. On air quality alert days, limit wood burning and check AirNow.gov.
Our children’s schools should be among the healthiest buildings in our community. Better measurement will one day tell us which steps matter most. Until then, fresh air, clean surfaces and clean hands are good for everyone who spends the school day indoors.
Ransford Okley Tetteh is an environmental researcher in the BioAnalytical Chemistry Laboratory at Michigan Technological University.