Breathing city air = smoking cigarettes? There’s an app for that

254

Shit! I Smoke.

That’s the name of a new app – which, ostensibly, will also be the reaction of many anti-cigarette inner-city dwellers when they realize the amount of similar toxins they’re putting in their lungs by living in a metropolis. It isn’t surprising, really; more just confirming what many of us already knew about big cities: By living here, we are all smokers.

The app is a collaboration between Brazilian designer Marcelo Coelho and French developer Amaury Martiny, inspired by a study on exactly that: Comparing cigarette smoke with living in automobile, smokestack, and smog-filled city air. The study, authored by California University physics professors Richard A. Muller and Elizabeth A. Muller, uses good old fashioned math to calculate the number of cigarettes smoked using environmental levels of PM2.5, which is the cancerous microscopic particle you really don’t want in your lungs.

Basically, Shit! I Smoke uses live, and constantly streaming pollution data from hundreds of air quality stations in cities across the world to calculate the number of cigarettes you smoke daily by breathing in your city’s air.

“Here is the rule of thumb: one cigarette per day is the rough equivalent of a PM2.5 level of 22 μg/m3 (…).”

So, take a deep breath and… how do you feel?

Your current location + live data from your nearest air quality stations = the number of cigarettes you’ve smoked for the day. Here at the Twin Cities Agenda office we’re currently at a solid 0.4 so far today (it’s 9:45am. And we’re fairly certain that was just from the morning commute).

And, an important note in the study, as cigarettes are limited by age restriction, “…Of course, unlike cigarette smoking, the pollution reaches every age group…” which makes you wonder just a little bit about the future.

The full study can be found here: Air pollution and cigarette equivalence

You can download the app here:

 
And, cough, cough, maybe read this next: Twin Cities air quality: Don’t hold your breath