A picture of Baltimore’s trash is worth a thousand words
TAKING ON TRASH. Part of an occasional Brew series on what litters Baltimore’s landscape – and what residents are doing about it
Above: Typical Baltimore trash, ye olde plastic cup on its way down the storm drain.
Booze bottles, cigarette packs, dog poop, fast food wrappers, and glassine heroin bags: the icons of Baltimore street trash. If Baltimoreans could see what they trash the city with, would they behave better?
Tomorrow, Blue Water Baltimore is sponsoring #Litterati #Baltimore, a virtual day of service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., where residents will clean up trash in their communities, document what they find on Instagram and post the images to Litterati, a global online landfill.
The process is simple: See a piece of litter, photograph it with a smart phone or tablet, post the photo to your Instagram (a free photo-sharing app) account using #litterati and #bluewaterbmore hashtags – optionally, add other hashtags such as #can #papercup, #bottle, #Marlboro, #SunPlus, #Starbucks, etc.
Then either compost, recycle, or throw the litter away.
Vince Vizachero, who runs social media for Blue Water Baltimore, says the impetus behind #Litterati #Baltimore was twofold. Blue Water, a local environmental organization, wanted to sponsor an event people could participate in during the winter months.
They also wanted to introduce our trash-plagued town to Litterati. The social media effort that uses technology and art to document trash clean-up has become popular in cities such as San Francisco, but is not yet well known in Baltimore.
“Baltimore has above-average litter awareness,” he said. “We thought Litterati would be a good fit for the city.”
Another very Baltimore species of street garbage – SunPlus. (Photo by Danielle Sweeney.)
Blue Water has been posting photos to Litterati’s global digital landfill, documenting Charm City’s trash, for some time.
A Picture of Trash is Worth. . .
Since smart phone users’ photos are geo-tagged, each piece of trash is geo-mapped on Litterati at the street level.
That data, Vizachero says, can be used in any number of ways to change the way communities deal with their trash.
A group of high schoolers used Litterati to document the trash on their school grounds.
“With Litterati, they determined much of it was, actually, wrappers from drinking straws. They took the data to their principal and asked the school system to buy straws without wrappers. They were able to curb a major source of litter,” Vizachero says
Litterati data from Baltimore could be used in similar ways, he says, to reduce trash or make disposing of it more efficient. One example might be helping the city fine-tune its street sweeping efforts, he says.
Blue Water hopes to use Litterati this spring to help document the refuse it collects from city streams and waterways.
“It would give us insights into the volume and kind of trash we collect and could give us hard data,”Vizachero says.
Vizachero notes that images of trash have a strong immediate impact.
“They make a powerful argument about trash in a way that citizen complaints about litter often can’t.”
Blue Water encourages residents to use Litterati not just tomorrow, but every day. Learn more about #Litterati #Baltimore on Blue Water’s web site.