Hold Your Breath: The Dirtiest Cities in the World — 2022

We analyzed air pollution, water quality, and wastewater disposal. The result is quite surprising.

Levi Borba

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Krasnoyarsk, in Russia.
This city is Russia among the dirtiest (in terms of pollution) in the world. Source of the image: Pixabay, and edited by the author.

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What makes a city… dirty?

When I was 21, I moved from a countryside town where the air smelled like orange cake (since we had some fruit processing plants around) to an 11-million-resident metropolis. Every day on my way back from work, I needed to take a road close to a river that smelled like sewage (and probably had some illegal sewage discharges on it).

The streets had rats (I never saw an urban rat in my life until I moved there), and the air was so dirty during the winter that after a day out, you could rub a white napkin in your hair and it would turn gray. My lungs are glad that I don’t live there anymore.

That was a dirty city for me, and I bet you agree with me.

And using criteria that measure air and water quality, plus sewage treatment, me and my team at Expatriate Consultancy compiled this list of the dirtiest cities in the world in 2022.

This is not the first time we publish a polemical ranking. On other occasions, we told you about:

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