- A new state ranking reveals how smelly each state in the United States is.
- Thinks like landfills, methane emissions, and cropland were all factored into each state’s overall score.
- States with large areas of untouched land faired far better than others, but the smelliest state on the list is still a bit of a surprise.
Does your state stink? I don’t mean in a “my state is boring, it stinks” kind of way, but does it really actually stink? How much does it stink compared to other states? This is a question you’ve probably never asked yourself — at least I know I definitely haven’t — but leave it to BestLife to come up with the answer.
The website posted a ranking of all 50 US states based on their “Smelliness Score.” Now, how do you go about calculating such a thing? It’s actually fairly straightforward. BestLife came up with its score for each state by taking into account the following: methane emissions per capita, percentage of each state occupied by both landfills and cropland (cow farts), and how much natural gas production is happening within each state.
Black Friday 2020 is here
Before we get into the smelly end of the list, let’s take a look at the states that rank the lowest, meaning that these should be the states that smell the nicest overall.
- Nevada
- Maine
- Utah
- Arizona
- Vermont
- Oregon
- Idaho
- New Hampshire
- Montana
- Hawaii
Well, there’s definitely a trend here. Several of these states have huge, wide-open spaces with lots of nature. These areas aren’t landfills or cropland and that dramatically brings down their potential smelliness score. Likewise, most of the states on the bottom of the list don’t produce natural gas, helping to lower their scores even further.
Now for the top of the list. Here are the smelliest states in the country:
- Delaware
- West Virginia
- Illinois
- North Dakota
- Indiana
- Iowa
- New Jersey
- Ohio
- Rhode Island
- Maryland
Based on the factors that impact the smelliness score, you can see why several of these states made the top of the list. There’s a whole lot of farmland in Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, and several others. West Virginia finds itself near the top of the list thanks to huge natural gas production and methane emissions, while Delaware takes the top spot in large part due to a combination of cropland and landfills.
Now, none of this is to say that you can’t open your window and get a nice breath of fresh air in any state. It’s just a measurement of various data points that might cause your state to be smellier than others. As always, if you didn’t see your state on either of these two lists that means it lies somewhere in the middle. You can check out the full 50-state ranking on BestLife.
