It’s inspiring to see that picking up litter consistently had a big impact on a neighborhood. We were also surprised to see the strong effect the California Camp Fires had on litter. Hope you enjoy!<p>Background: My friends, Elena and Felipe, and I have been picking up litter 3x per week on Polk Street for year now. We logged all the litter we picked up to see what we can find. After a year picking up we decided to see what we can learn from the data and we wrote an article with the results.<p>We used the <a href="https://www.rubbish.love" rel="nofollow">https://www.rubbish.love</a>, which I helped program, to track all the items.
I used to wonder what caused the crazy amount of litter in SF. After working in SOMA for years, I believe the vast majority is due to people rummaging through trash cans in search of food/recyclables/whatever, often dumping the entire contents directly onto the sidewalk. I've seen this more times than I can count.<p>More trash cans would be great, but they absolutely won't fix the problem when people regularly empty their contents onto the street.
Cigarette butts seem to be the most common by <i>count</i>, but what about weight and volume?<p>On the streets of NYC, I don't really notice the cigarettes, but I do notice the enormous amount of plastic bags (much of it stuck in trees), plastic or paper cups, straws, takeout containers. And gum. If you ever look at a sidewalk and see dark splotches [1], that's discarded chewing gum. It's absolutely everywhere. Not as invasive, of course, just odd.<p>I don't know what SF is like, but NYC has a fascinatingly ugly system [2] where you're supposed to put trash and recycling out on the sidewalk for it to be collected, where it's effectively temporary litter. NYC's sanitation workers are notoriously careless about handling the trash, and my pet theory is that a sizable portion of street litter actually originates in the sanitation workers spilling trash on pickup day.<p>NYC's trash problem is also exacerbated by the fact that landlords can get away with not doing their part in keeping the outside of the building litter-free.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ediblegeography.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Splotchy-pavement.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.ediblegeography.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/S...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://i.redd.it/x0iye2nog6m31.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/x0iye2nog6m31.jpg</a>
Love this article because it's something that has also intrigued me. I used to live in the Inner Richmond and someone would always dump a big pile of trash near the corner of my block. Finally I got sick of this and rummaged through the trash and found some bank statements and RX bottles (all with the same name and address). I called the person and sent a photo with their trash and told them to find somewhere else to drop their garbage or I'd be reporting them. Seemed to address the problem (or realistically shifted it to someone else's property).
This was a fascinating read. I'm surprised tobacco is the number 1 litter. I rarely see people smoking anymore where I live, so I would assume it would not be a top contributor to litter. Is smoking still very prevalent in San Fransisco?
I played with the thought that municipalities should hold the producers of the product (packaging) that can be foud in the streets responsible for the cleanup cost.<p>Some kind of data needs to be collected by a team like this team an based on that data the offending brands get bills.<p>Besides that I think littering could benefit from heavy fines, the same way speeding tickets helped with traffic safety.<p>Basically a near little free environment should be our aim, I do not see why cannot make this happen.
> April 22, 2019, is a prominent example, though we don’t know for sure what happened that day to cause it.<p>Monday, 4/22, was Earth Day, after Good Friday, Passover,
Easter, and of course 4/20 - so a near-perfect storm
for SF.
I’d be interested in seeing the correlation with the existence (or not) of trashcans. Huge swathes of commercial/retail areas in SF have no/few trashcans, and I would assume that there’s a limit to how long people will carry trash/empty containers before just dropping them on the ground
"""Rubbish is working with cities and communities to create a smart approach to litter, using data to put cigarette disposals and trash cans where they will have the biggest impact."""<p>I really like that approach to quantitate where the hotspots are and to deliver bins accordingly.
A simple form of this was done in Prague recently, to see what tourists were throwing away (5 min video).<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Vj8wb5jAs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Vj8wb5jAs</a>
Curious, did you also remove chewing gum from the streets? And is this in the "food" category? I would expect the numbers for food to be higher than for tobacco then.
"Many of the peaks in this dataset correspond to holidays and/or events that bring more people out onto the street — Halloween, for example, shows up prominently."<p>yeah I guess so