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What Is a Clean City?
What's the cleanest big city in America? How about the dirtiest? And what about the place where you live -- did it make the list?Reader's Digest compared data on our 50 most populous metropolitan areas to come up with a ranking of America's cleanest cities. You might be able to guess some of the winners -- and losers. But get ready for plenty of surprises.
First, though, what is a clean city? Ideally, it's a place where the air quality is good, the water is safe to drink, and factories aren't dumping harmful chemical waste into the environment. It's also a place where you look up and down streets that are free of garbage, and stroll through parks without wading through litter. To gauge these things, we used several databases as yardsticks for measuring cleanliness. That data pertained not just to the cities themselves, but to their Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), which include the surrounding suburbs and counties.
We also wanted to dig beneath the data to find out just what our highest-scoring cities were doing right. So we talked with policymakers, economists, activists and government workers in the top five cities. As you'll see, these places have earned their rankings -- and their success holds some lessons for the rest of us.
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