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We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
- EminIsrafil 7y agoIt’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! 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. We used the https://www.rubbish.love https://www.rubbish.love, which I helped program, to track all the items.
- vcdimension 7y agoHave you seen this project: http://thecrowbox.com/ http://thecrowbox.com/ and this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8lZ4I-UamM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8lZ4I-UamM Maybe we could train squirrels too..
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoI've seen this, and it is rather sad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iux2OV3w4NI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iux2OV3w4NI
- vcdimension 7y agoHahaha!! I think it's feasible we could train birds to do that. I would rather live in a world like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIwa9sPFT5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIwa9sPFT5I than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mg7qKstnPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mg7qKstnPk
- deftnerd 7y agoCan you give us more information on the "Rubbish Beam", pictures, tech details, and why it's so expensive? You say on a request form that you're hoping to make it cheaper, but what's the biggest block to making that happen? Is it just a standard grabber but with a cellphone holder and some kind of bluetooth trigger embedded in the "grabbing handle" that triggers the phone to take a picture?
- felipemelivilu 7y agoFelipe here, I design and build the beams. Until now it was mostly an issue of scale as we refined the prototype. They took time to assemble and without large order price breaks on components the direct cost was high. We've invested time into a new version that is more scalable and will be ready soon.
- olliej 7y agoI’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
- Tharkun 7y agoI've noticed a similar pattern in my neighbourhood. No rubbish bins and plenty of littering. When I approached the city council about this, I was told they wouldn't install rubbish bins because -- I kid you not -- that would encourage people to put their waste in the bins... It's not uncommon to see less well-off people walk around town, putting a little bit of rubbish into any bin they pass. It's risky, because fines for dumping household waste in public bins are steep. Disposing of household waste is quite expensive here, only waste in "official" bin bags is collected, and they're over 1eur/ piece. It's a contributing factor to poverty, and, in my opinion, to fly tipping. After all, why pay for expensive bin bags when you can just chuck your litter anywhere with impunity?
- roguecoder 7y agoThat seems like it would be easy to solve by delivering each household a minimum number of bags and then charging for using extra, instead of making the tax maximally-regressive.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lozaning 7y agoOne of the things that I've noticed traveling internationally for work is how much this differs from country to country. You'll be hard pressed to find a public trash can anywhere in Suwoon, South Korea. Meanwhile there's a trashcan on every single street corner in Düsseldorf, Germany. Neither city had much trash.
- dboreham 7y ago
- irrational 7y agoThis 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?
- Reedx 7y ago> Is smoking still very prevalent in San Fransisco? No, but for some reason people think throwing cigarette butts on the ground and out of car windows isn't littering.
- woah 7y agoThey are returning the gifts of the tobacco plant to the Earth
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoAlong with the dino juice for the filter. It's a circle of life.
- CriticalCathed 7y agoI think it's not so much that it's very prevalent, I think it's that most smokers don't carry their butts away with them if there's not a trash can 30 millimeters from their hands.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoHa, drivers almost certainly have a ready receptacle in their car, they still wind down the window and throw the butts out.
- brenden2 7y agoI have a dog, and when we're walking around I always notice all the cigarette butts on the ground (because my dog tries to eat everything off the ground so I have to watch). It doesn't surprise me that so much litter is just tobacco products. (Also I live in NYC these days, but I used to live in SF).
- amelius 7y agoCurious, 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.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoDo people still chew gum?
- exolymph 7y agoI mean... yes? Did you think that people had stopped chewing gum?
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoIt used to be very common to see, it's probably just me, but I've not seen anyone chew gum in a few years - except those on nicotine gum. So I figured it has perhaps fallen out of favour, obviously it's still sold, so yes someone is chewing it.
- newnewpdro 7y agoIt's often the most convenient form of breathe odor control available. I keep a pack of gum in my car at all times just in case I have a drink socializing somewhere. Having alcoholic beverages on your breath when you get pulled over for something unrelated can make the experience far more annoying, unnecessarily.
- maccard 7y agoYou could keep mints instead of gum? My parents kept gum in the car for a long time, and every time I took some it was always stale.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoNo idea if it's true but I've heard a lot of mints have alcohols in them which could skew breathalyzer tests if you have one in your mouth a few minutes before.
- diogenescynic 7y agoLove 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).
- Gibbon1 7y agoIf you report to the city they'll fine them for that.
- newnewpdro 7y agoDid you have a conversation about the dumping? Or was it simply you threatening them then goodbye?
- misterirony 7y agoI thought this would be a recent batch review…
- jeromebaek 7y agoTreat the symptoms, not the disease. Way to go!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- personlurking 7y agoA simple form of this was done in Prague recently, to see what tourists were throwing away (5 min video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Vj8wb5jAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Vj8wb5jAs
- frostyj 7y ago"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." yeah I guess so
- Animats 7y agoWait until DNA reading gets cheap enough to be used for this. Then we can downgrade the social credit scores of litterers.
- phil248 7y agoMost of the people I see litter in SF already have zero social credit and don't look like they're trying to earn any.
- Consultant32452 7y agoI'm imagining a future where you can inject drugs using govt provided syringes while defecating in the street no problem, but if you drop a cigarette butt we'll track you down and arrest you for littering.
- throw03172019 7y agoFuture? This is current SF! :)
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoGovernment-run programs almost always take the form of needle exchanges. By requiring their return, they actually prevent littering.
- bgentry 7y agoI 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. More trash cans would be great, but they absolutely won't fix the problem when people regularly empty their contents onto the street.
- steve19 7y agoThere is a school of thought that less trash cans reduces litter. I am a little skeptical of the idea but I see the point.
- jacobush 7y agoIn Japan, there are no trash cans and people take their litter with them. In Disneyland, there was more litter until they put trashcans everywhere.
- greggman2 7y agoAnd the have this subtle dystopian message on each one "Waste Please" https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&q=Waste+Please+Disneyland&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&q=Waste+Please+Dis...
- verall 7y agoThis is nonsense, there are plenty of public trash cans in Tokyo at least. Not on every corner like in the States, but within 2-3 blocks you can find one and plenty of establishments have no problem letting you use their trash can.
- chrischen 7y agoI generally see homeless people constantly littering, among leaving other things on the streets...
- dilap 7y ago
- dmckeon 7y ago> April 22, 2019, is a prominent example, though we don’t know for sure what happened that day to cause it. Monday, 4/22, was Earth Day, after Good Friday, Passover, Easter, and of course 4/20 - so a near-perfect storm for SF.
- atombender 7y agoCigarette butts seem to be the most common by count, but what about weight and volume? 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. 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. 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. [1] https://www.ediblegeography.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Splotchy-pavement.jpg https://www.ediblegeography.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/S... [2] https://i.redd.it/x0iye2nog6m31.jpg https://i.redd.it/x0iye2nog6m31.jpg
- hapless 7y agoSF makes NYC look like Disneyland.
- etrautmann 7y agohaving just moved from SF to NYC, I think the trash bags in NYC are much worse than the majority of SF. Union Square and the Tenderloin are another phenomenon entirely though with feces and urine everywhere. This appears to be less common in NYC.
- fnord77 7y agoI think SF gets that concentrated urine stench because it doesn't rain 2/3rds out of the year so the sidewalks never get cleansed. NYC would stink just as bad if it didn't rain all summer. Maybe worse because of the higher population density.
- waynecochran 7y agoI am surprised that poop wasn't mentioned. Nor drug paraphernalia. That kills the attractiveness of SF far more than anything else.
- cjensen 7y agoBoth were mentioned, you just missed it :-)
- waynecochran 7y agoYou're right. One single sentence with the poop emoji used and the mention of used needles. No wonder I missed it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cies 7y agoI 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. Some kind of data needs to be collected by a team like this team an based on that data the offending brands get bills. Besides that I think littering could benefit from heavy fines, the same way speeding tickets helped with traffic safety. Basically a near little free environment should be our aim, I do not see why cannot make this happen.
- agota 7y agoWhy would you hold the companies that produce the products responsible when they have no control over what someone does with the packaging of their products?
- matthewowen 7y agoCompanies have choice over how they package their products, and have a number of levers to change behavior: they might reduce the extent to which they provide packaging (does that single piece of fruit need to be wrapped in plastic?), or offer incentives to customers to provide their own packaging (eg cups at coffee shops), or might provide incentives for packaging to be returned instead of trashed (deposits on cans and bottles). And at the end of all that, if a company still produces products that we know will probably end as packaging litter... hell yeah, charge them (and implicitly the littering consumers) for that negative externality.
- agota 7y agoI don't think that companies should be held responsible for crimes committed using their products. Why not directly punish the person who committed the crime?
- matthewowen 7y agoBecause it's easier to punish the people who enable it.
- WalterBright 7y agoI once visited Ogden, Utah, on business. The city was remarkably free of litter.
- jxramos 7y ago"""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.""" I really like that approach to quantitate where the hotspots are and to deliver bins accordingly.