Detroit ranked second most polluted U.S. city

With 66 Superfund sites, 281 facilities releasing toxic chemicals and 42,051 lbs. of toxic chemicals released each year, the Detroit-Warren-Livonia metro area was ranked the second most polluted city in the country by Forbes magazine, but some believe the methodology used by the magazine does not produce a realistic picture of environmental health hazards.

Here’s how Forbes came up with their ranking.

To determine which cities are most toxic, Forbes looked at the country’s 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas –geographic entities that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget defines and uses in collecting statistics — based on data provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. We counted the number of facilities that reported releasing toxins into the environment, the total pounds of certain toxic chemicals released into the air, water and earth, the days per year that air pollution was above healthy levels, and the total number of Superfund sites — contaminated areas that the federal government has designated for cleanup efforts — in each metro area’s principal city.

According to environmental consultant Alex Sagady, however, this scoring system does not give a fair evaluation of local environmental health hazards because it does not take into account the varying toxicity of chemicals or the different ways that people might get exposed to pollution.

“Scoring systems like these do not consider the effect of geographical environmental data variation sufficiently well to be fair and accurate risk predictions for environmental health and toxic hazards, even on just a screening basis,” Sagady said on an environmental e-mail list. “The Forbes Survey is not capable of demonstrating any reliable screening nor estimate of environmental health risk as none of the factors relied upon are sufficient to estimate human health and ecological risk from exposure to toxicants.”