Breathing in Houston and Dallas’ Air is Just as Bad as Smoking Cigarettes: New App Uses Cute Graphics to Drive Home Real Pollution Horrors

Do you smoke? No? Well, if you live in one of Texas’ biggest cities, you might as well have.

Cigarette tobacco, air pollution — it’s all the same to your lungs. And it’s even worse than you may think.

We’re not just blowing smoke. Every time you inhale in a major Texas city, you’re putting yourself at risk. Sadly, there’s science to prove it. Our big Texas skies may seem clear and blue, but there’s a lot of danger lurking in them.

Now, there’s a way to tell exactly how much we’re inadvertently using our bodies as ashtrays. The new app Shit!, I Smoke, uses live population data from global measurement stations to convert the damage done by air pollutants to the harmfulness of smoking cigarettes and packages it in a cute, if horrifying, graphic.

Thanks to Brazilian designer Marcelo Coelho and French app developer Amaury Martiny, we now know that anyone who lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth Area is essentially smoking 0.4 cigarettes a day by breathing. But wait, it gets worse. Much worse.

Breathing in Houston’s area is the equivalent of smoking almost two cigarettes worth a day. The official measure is 1.8 cigarettes.

If it makes you feel the littlest bit better, Beijing residents are breathing in the equivalent of as much as 25 cigarettes each day. People in Delhi get nearly 20 cigarettes worth of damage daily just by breathing.

We call the people that smoke casually “social smokers.” What should we call people that suffer as much damage as those smoking every time they breathe? We may need a term, because in Texas, that’s pretty much all of us. We may not be in Beijing, but our major cities are no stranger to pollutants.

The digital developers created the app in just one week, after reading an article analyzing air pollution’s equivalence to smoking cigarettes. The Berkley Earth study involves a mathematical model comparing the deaths caused by smoking and tobacco to deaths related to levels of PM2.5, a microscopic particle that becomes cancerous after combustion.

Shit!, I Smoke geolocates your phone then connects to the pollution databases, showing you the number of cigarettes you “smoked” that day.

You don’t even have to put this news in your pipe to smoke it.