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Most toxic city? Hint: It’s not Tampa Bay

What’s the most toxic city in America? That is, the city with the worst environmental problems, judged on the basis of dirty air, unclean water and the rate of environmental hazards?

Atlanta skyline

You may have thought Los Angeles with all of its smog, or you may have thought of a place like Chicago, with its reputation as an industrial center.

However, you would have been wrong on both counts, and on a number of other counts, as well.  Because, according to Forbes Magazine, the most toxic city in the U.S. is… Atlanta!

Yeah, I’m surprised, too.  We spent a very nice weekend in Atlanta a year or two ago, and I never had the sense that the city was unusually unclean or polluted. But according to Forbes, Atlanta is not only the most toxic city in the country, it has zoomed up to the Number One spot from Number 28 just a year before.

The next question from me is, so where does Tampa Bay rank on the Forbes list?

Tampa Bay is quite a ways down the list, at Number 16 (tied with the Miami area and St. Louis.) That’s not exactly great on a list with 40 positions, but it’s not terrible, either. Accortding to Forbes, Tampa Bay releases about 4 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment every year, a mere pittance compared to Atlanta’s 41 million pounds.

So what community occupies the final spot on Forbes’ 40-spot list?  According to the magazine, it’s Las Vegas.

Tags: environment, Tampa Bay, toxic

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Market Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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