Taxing pollution

Polluted air can be likened to cigarette smoke, and a new app can tell you how many cigarette-equivalents you are ‘smoking’ while walking through various cities of the world, according to a story by Martin Echenique for citylab.com.
Shit, I Smoke! was created by Brazil-born designer Marcelo Coelho and France-born app developer Amaury Martiny after they read a study that analyzed air pollution and its link with cigarette smoke.
The article, co-written by Richard Mueller, a MacArthur fellow and physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, described a mathematical model that compared smoke and PM2.5 particles.
‘Here is the rule of thumb: one cigarette per day is the rough equivalent of a PM2.5 level of 22 μg/m3 (…),’ the study reads. ‘Of course, unlike cigarette smoking, the pollution reaches every age group.’
The study found that, in 2016, Beijing had on average a PM2.5 level of 85 μg/m3, which equates to four cigarettes a day, while Los Angeles County registered an average of half a cigarette a day, or 12 μg/m3.
Using the formula in the article, Coelho and Martiny designed an ad-free interface that uses live pollution data from hundreds of air quality stations in cities around the world and converts the station’s PM2.5 number into the number of cigarette-equivalents being inhaled by a person in real time.
“The interface is pretty straightforward: it geolocates your phone, connects to the database, and shows the number of cigarettes smoked that day,” Coelho was quoted as saying.
The app apparently reveals that Parisians can inhale the equivalent of between three and six cigarettes a day, while a person in Delhi could be ‘smoking’ up to 20 cigarettes on a bad day.