Cities Clean as a Whistle or Full of Filth

What's the cleanest big city in the U.S.? How about the dirtiest? Reader's Digest decided to find out, by analyzing data to score each of the 50 largest cities on air quality, water quality, industrial pollution (toxics), Superfund sites, and sanitation. Rather than just the cities themselves, they looked at metropolitan areas, which include surrounding counties and suburbs. (This can have a real effect on a place's score.

Chicago, for example, has excellent water but its score is brought down by problems in the outlying areas). Because this evaluation only looked at the 50 largest places, there may be smaller cities that are much cleaner or dirtier than these — and because the scores represent relative rankings, that a city comes in first or last in a given category does not necessarily mean it's perfectly pristine or dangerously filthy.

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