And America’s Dirtiest Metropolis Is…

Well, you guessed it, New York City of course – this dirty city has more pests and litter than any other large metropolis in the United States, according to newly compiled government data by the cleaning-services company Busy Bee.

The cleaning company ranked 40 large cities across the United States based on data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the American Housing Survey (AHS), and the U.S. Census Bureau to create an informative infographic to determine just how shitty America really is. Factors include litter, pests such as mice and cockroaches, population density, particulate matter air pollution, and nitrogen dioxide air pollution.

The City that Never Sleeps ranked the highest in three out of five categories, placing it as shittest-city-in-the-nation of 427.9 on Busy Bee’s “dirtiness index.” The next closest competitor for all the wrong reasons is Los Angeles, which has a dirtiness index of 317.8. To complete the top five list, the remaining dirtiest cities are Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

Busy Bee Cleaning Service is one of New York’s premier commercial cleaning services, but in their latest report, they might have angered the millennial generation who just moved out of their parent’s basements into overpriced homes across America’s inner cities, to only now discover their new environment is trash. Busy Bee does a great job tearing apart the narrative that everything is awesome in America’s inner cities, and perhaps, the ‘City that Never Sleeps’ should take a night off to realize just how much trash its citizens are living in. The report further verifies that America’s empire is rotting from within, as its culture and lifestyles from its major metropolises are producing a toxic environment that is softly killing its citizens from within.

The New York Patch highlights just how toxic these inner cities are:

Some 904,000 homes in the city have litter on nearby streets or properties, and nearly 2.3 million homes have seen signs of mice, rats or cockroaches in the past year, Busy Bee’s review shows. New York also ranks first for population density, with 28,000 people per square mile.

New York has less air pollution than some other large cities. EPA figures show the city’s air has a one-hour average concentration of 60 parts per billion of nitrogen dioxide, a harmful chemical that can cause breathing problems. Los Angeles leads the nation in that category, with a one-hour average of 77 parts per billion.

Pittsburgh is the worst city when it comes to particle pollution, which the EPA says can give harmful substances a way in to a person’s lungs or bloodstream. The Steel City shows a 24-hour average concentration of 40 micrograms of particles per cubic meter of air, double New York City’s average of 20 micrograms per cubic meter of air.

Even if New Yorkers get used to the grime, that doesn’t change the fact that the city is still far dirtier than many others. Take Jacksonville, Florida, which was the cleanest city Busy Bee reviewed. Just 44,000 homes there reported litter and 90,000 had evidence of pests, the company’s review shows.