The planetis notwaiting.
Understand pollution. Discover the facts. Take action for a cleaner and healthier future.
Checking the air…Dirty air sideClean air sideDrag the Earth
How dirty is your air?
Checking…
Checking the air…
If the air stays like this for life, it takes away
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Best time to play outside
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Dirty air attacks your whole body
The dust is too tiny to see. You breathe it in, it slips into your blood, and your blood carries it everywhere.
The darker lung is a picture of how far this air is over the safe limit set by the World Health Organization.
Since you opened this page, dirty air has ended about
0
lives around the world.
The World Health Organization links air pollution, outdoors and indoors together, to about 6.7 million early deaths a year. That is one person roughly every 5 seconds.
You can fix this. Start here.
Pick what you promise to do. Watch the Earth get cleaner with every promise.
Tap “I promise” on a card to begin.
Other cities right now
Tap a face to see that city.
Checking 64 cities…
What is Toxic Future?
A free page that turns air pollution into pictures anyone can read, so that people know how dirty their air is and what they can do about it. It carries no adverts and is not connected to any government or company.
How the numbers are worked out
- Cigarettes a day = PM2.5 ÷ 22. Berkeley Earth found that breathing 22 µg/m³ of fine dust for a day does about as much harm as one cigarette.
- Life lost = (yearly PM2.5 − 5) × 0.098 years. From the University of Chicago's Air Quality Life Index. The 5 is the safe yearly limit in the WHO guidelines.
- Faces and colours follow the US air quality index bands.
- These are averages across whole populations. They describe risk and cannot predict what happens to one person. This is not medical advice.
Where the data comes from
- Live and past air readings: Open-Meteo Air Quality API, from the European Union's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. It is a computer model on squares of about 40 km (11 km in Europe), so one busy road can be worse than the number shown. The time of each reading is printed under the cigarettes.
- Berkeley Earth, Air Pollution and Cigarette Equivalence
- Air Quality Life Index methodology, University of Chicago
- World Health Organization, air pollution fact sheets: diseases, yearly deaths and the 2021 guidelines
- The Nature Conservancy, Planting Healthy Air: dust levels 7% to 24% lower near trees
- US EPA AirNow: index bands and advice
- Earth picture: NASA Blue Marble.
Your privacy
This page has no accounts, no adverts and no tracking cookies. The place you search, or your location if you tap “Find me”, is sent to Open-Meteo and BigDataCloud only to fetch the air reading and the place name. Your promises and a small cache of readings are saved in your own browser and nowhere else.