Toronto Is Cleaner than Kobe, Dirtier than Dublin

There's nothing like a list to feel like we're better than other places.

The latest, a 300 city comparison of the world's cleanest cities completed by Mercer Human Resources Consulting, has Toronto tied with Amsterdam for 21st place in city cleanliness.

While you can still hear Americans talk about how clean our city is (and make other comments like "your money is funny lookin'"), we've been beaten out by a bunch of other Canadian cities like Ottawa (4th place) and Montreal and Vancouver (tied for 10th).

And if you want to live in the world's cleanest city, buy a cowboy hat and move to the oil-boom town of Calgary. And I thought bubblin' crude wasn't so clean?

In the spirit of spring cleaning, it would be nice to improve our ranking. According to Forbes, the cleanest cities are high-tech, focus on education and have a strong public transportation system. If we focus on that, we can even beat those clean-freaks in 6th place Oslo.

photo: Image from Jon. from the blogTO flickr pool.