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TrashTag is an internet challenge and hashtag campaign where people clean up a heavily littered area, posting before and after photos with the hashtag #trashtag. [1]
Steven Reinhold started the TrashTag Challenge in 2015 after accidentally littering on a road trip. He vowed to gather 100 pieces of trash. [2] "On this road trip, we went to all these different national parks and we were basically geotagging the trash as we picked it up," Reinhold said. "At some point, we said 'why not hashtag it #trashtag?'" Reinhold partnered with UCO Gear and developed a cleanup ambassador program spreading the challenge in the outdoor community. [3]
Byron Roman, a Phoenix, Arizona, resident, reposted a picture on March 5, 2019, of a litter-strewn roadside area in Algeria along with an "after" shot of Drici Tani Younes posing with nine massive bags of trash, all stuffed to the brim in the middle of the freshly cleaned strip of dirt. The post went viral and was shared more than 300,000 times, prompting over fifty million new posts and imitators seeking to outdo Román or simply add to the impact of the #trashtag efforts. Trashtag has an estimated five million monthly participants. [4] [5]
TrashTag cleanups have been held globally in cities, mountains, rivers, and beaches. They have ranged from Mount Everest to undersea diving excursions. [6] [1] Cleanup challenges have been held globally including the United States, Algeria, Malaysia, Mexico, India, Nepal, Norway, Scotland, RoC, and PR China as well as being replicated in other languages such as "#basurachallenge" for Spanish. [7] [8]
Litter consists of waste products that have been discarded incorrectly, without consent, at an unsuitable location. The word litter can also be used as a verb: to litter means to drop and leave objects, often man-made, such as aluminum cans, paper cups, food wrappers, cardboard boxes or plastic bottles on the ground, and leave them there indefinitely or for other people to dispose of as opposed to disposing of them correctly.
Keep America Beautiful is a nonprofit organization founded in 1953. It is the largest community improvement organization in the United States, with more than 700 state and community-based affiliate organizations and more than 1,000 partner organizations.
Marine debris, also known as marine litter, is human-created waste that has deliberately or accidentally been released in a sea or ocean. Floating oceanic debris tends to accumulate at the center of gyres and on coastlines, frequently washing aground, when it is known as beach litter or tidewrack. Deliberate disposal of wastes at sea is called ocean dumping. Naturally occurring debris, such as driftwood and drift seeds, are also present. With the increasing use of plastic, human influence has become an issue as many types of (petrochemical) plastics do not biodegrade quickly, as would natural or organic materials. The largest single type of plastic pollution (~10 %) and majority of large plastic in the oceans is discarded and lost nets from the fishing industry. Waterborne plastic poses a serious threat to fish, seabirds, marine reptiles, and marine mammals, as well as to boats and coasts.
Geotagging, or GeoTagging, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names, and perhaps a time stamp.
Ocean Conservancy is a nonprofit environmental advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., United States.
Granite Gear is an American outdoor company that sells backpacks, along with hiking and portage accessories. The company was founded in 1986 by outdoorsmen Jeff Knight and Dan Cruikshank, based in Two Harbors, MN.
The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is a conservation initiative of the Ocean Wise Conservation Association and WWF-Canada. The Shoreline Cleanup encourages people across Canada to remove shoreline litter to help create healthy waters for everyone, including the wildlife and communities that depend on them.
Litter in the United States is an environmental issue and littering is often a criminal offense, punishable with a fine as set out by statutes in many places. Litter laws, enforcement efforts, and court prosecutions are used to help curtail littering. All three are part of a "comprehensive response to environmental violators", write Epstein and Hammett, researchers for the United States Department of Justice. Littering and dumping laws, found in all fifty United States, appear to take precedence over municipal ordinances in controlling violations and act as public safety, not aesthetic measures. Similar from state-to-state, these laws define who violators are, the type or "function" of the person committing the action, and what items must be littered or dumped to constitute an illegal act. Municipal ordinances and state statutes require a "human action" in committing illegal littering or dumping, for one to be "held in violation." Most states require law enforcement officers or designated, authorized individuals, to "...witness the illegal act to write a citation." Together, prosecutions and punitive fines are important in fighting illegal littering and dumping.
Environmental volunteers conduct a range of activities including environmental monitoring ; ecological restoration such as revegetation and weed removal, and educating others about the natural environment. They also participate in community based projects, improving footpaths, open spaces, and local amenities for the benefit of the local community and visitors. The uptake of environmental volunteering stems in part from the benefits for the volunteers themselves, such as improving social networks and developing a sense of place.
Personal Responsibility in a Desirable Environment (PRIDE) is a non-profit organization that links citizens with the resources of local, state, and federal agencies to improve the region's water quality, clean up solid waste problems, and advance environmental education. It was originally launched by Congressman Hal Rogers and General James Bickford in 1997 and is a statewide non-profit organization in Kentucky.
Greenkeepers is an international, non-profit, and non-governmental service organization founded in 2009. Founded in Beijing, China, Greenkeepers is devoted to inspiring environmental awareness through local impacts within communities across the globe, including but not limited to its offices in Beijing and Fremont. Greenkeepers aspires to fundamentally change the way people see environmental work, and is renowned within local communities for its approach of leading by example - not only transforming the environment or promoting environmental awareness, but also redesigning societies' consumptions of limited resources.
The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit environmental engineering organization based in the Netherlands that develops technology to extract plastic pollution from the oceans and to capture it in rivers before it can reach the ocean. Their initial focus was on the Pacific Ocean and its garbage patch, and extended to rivers in countries including Indonesia, Guatemala, and the United States.
Plogging is a combination of jogging with picking up litter, merging the Swedish verbs plocka upp and jogga (jog) gives the new Swedish verb plogga, from which the word plogging derives. It started as an organized activity in Sweden around 2016 and spread to other countries in 2018, following increased concern about plastic pollution. As a workout, it provides variation in body movements by adding bending, squatting and stretching to the main action of running, hiking, or walking. An estimated 2,000,000 people plog daily in 100 countries and some plogging events have attracted over 3,000,000 participants.
National CleanUp Day is held annually in the United States and globally on the third Saturday of September. In the United States, there are cleanups held in every State and Territory. It promotes country-scale organized and individual cleanup events and volunteering to keep the outdoors clean and prevent plastic from entering the ocean. National CleanUp Day is organized by Clean Trails, a nonprofit organization founded by Bill Willoughby and Steve Jewett.
New York City's waste management system is a refuse removal system primarily run by the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY). The department maintains the waste collection infrastructure and hires public and private contractors who remove the city's waste. This waste, created by New York City's population of more than eight million, can amount to more than ten thousand tons a day.
Lilly Platt is a British-born Dutch environmentalist. Platt is known for her youth and for going on peaceful strikes to voice out environmental concerns. She is the Global Ambassador of YouthMundus, Earth.org, and WODI; youth ambassador for Plastic Pollution Coalition and How Global; and child ambassador for the World Cleanup Day. Platt initially went viral on social media after posting litter of plastic she picked up—sorted accordingly. Over the years she has picked up more than 100,000 of pieces of litter.
Internet challenges are a popular phenomenon on the Internet, encompassing a wide range of videos in which individuals record themselves performing specific actions or tasks, often daring others to do the same. These challenges have become a significant part of Internet meme culture, with many of them gaining widespread attention and popularity through memes. Notable examples of such challenges include the ALS Ice Bucket challenge, which gained viral status in mid-2014, and the TrashTag Challenge, which became popular in 2019.
A cleanup or clean-up is a form of environmental volunteering where a group of people get together to pick-up and dispose of litter in a designated location. Cleanups can take place on a street, in a neighborhood, at a park, on a water stream, or other public spaces. Cleanup events are often volunteer run. The cleanup volunteers make sure the waste picked-up is disposed of in its appropriate place. Cleanup events are often community-centered and led.
Friends of the Chicago River is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1979 with the purpose of improving and maintaining the ecological vitality of the 156-mile long Chicago River system, including its water, plant, and animal quality. The Friends of the Chicago River organizes cleanup initiatives and volunteer activities designed to improve the quality of the Chicago River system. The Friends of the Chicago River has created education and outreach programs, as well as partnering with establishments at the local and national level. The organization continuously publishes reports, findings, and updates about the Chicago River's condition.
