Two Places, One Problem: How Segregation at Home and Work Shapes Pollution Exposure

Abstract Structural racism is a fundamental driver of health disparities, partly because it leads to residential segregation and associated disparities in adverse exposures. However, only considering residences omits the influence of workplaces, which themselves may be segregated because of residential segregation and societal factors that influence how people are distributed across occupations. Using a dataset that provides home and workplace locations of ~95% of the U.S. workforce, we report associations between workplace-based White-Black segregation and census tract-level ambient pollutant concentrations in metropolitan statistical areas for 2018. Regressions that controlled for multiple covariates and residential segregation demonstrated that a standard deviation increase in workplace segregation is associated with a 0.10 (95% CI: 0.08, 0.11) ppb and 0.08 (95% CI: 0.002, 0.013) μg/m³ increase in NO₂ and PM2.5, respectively. Our work highlights a previously unrecognized pathway through which structural racism may impact environmental disparities.