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!
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.
Can 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?
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.
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 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.
> 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.
DSNY, aka Sanitation, does not pick up trash from commercial businesses, only residencies. Businesses have to hire a private carter. Private carters are notorious for not giving two fucks. They have also been responsible for many pedestrian accidents as well.
I have never really noticed a surge in trash in the streets after DSNY comes by. Though, after schools opened, my house is around the corner from a public school and I see an immediate surge of snack wrappers tossed on my lawn. Same with the building I own near another school, wrapper trash all over.
In NYC, those piles of garbage bags also have the effect of being seen as de facto garbage bins, so people will throw their litter on top of the piles as if they are some type of container to hold their trash.
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 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).
Most smokers assume that filters are actually biodegradable (it is possible to buy biodegradable filters if you roll your own), when in fact they aren't.
I never chuck my butts on the ground, if there isn't a rubbish bin nearby, I'll either put the butt back in my packet, or just put it in my pocket. When I see friends tossing their butts I always have a go at them for littering, most just don't even realise what they're doing is wrong.
I 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.
Some interesting tidbits on cigarette litter in San Francisco.
A study commissioned by SF Public Works in 2009 determined that the direct costs for cigarette related litter in San Francisco could be remediated with a 22 cent per pack tax. The actual tax in San Francisco is 85 cents per pack known as the "Cigarette Litter Abatement Fee". The 2009 study claimed around 30 million packs/year are sold in San Francisco which would be roughly 25 million dollars a year in taxes collected for this purpose with an estimated cleanup cost of only 7-8 million. So not only are cigarette smokers already paying for the cleanup they are paying nearly four times the actual cleanup cost for their litter.
Yes: people smoke walking down the street all the time. It is a real challenge having asthma.
I blame the lack of a real winter. In the northeast people quit smoking when it was banned indoors, because they didn't want to smoke in the freezing cold snow, whereas in SF people just go outside all year around.
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.
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.
25 cents deposits on cans and bottles did wonders in Germany. You can leave them anywhere in the city and they'll be gone within five minutes. This also turned out to be a surprisingly effective, although somewhat sad, wealth redistribution scheme.
It's unfortunately not realistic to do for every kind of wrapper. Although maybe a weight-based rough measurement might work: I. e. a cents/gram of packaging, and your recycling is spot-checked for contamination. It seems slightly too convoluted, invasive, and draconian even for me, a German green. But might be a possible application of AI ("estimate the number of product wrappings in this heap").
Why 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?
San Francisco already does this with cigarettes. An eighty five cent tax per pack is levied specifically for this purpose. So around 4.25 cents per cigarette. I don't see why this could not be applied to other problematic litter sources.
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
I'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?
One 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.
Tokyo has almost no public trashcans. And the crowds are significantly larger than SF, and it's significantly cleaner in Tokyo (at least from what I've seen).
I visited a friend in South America. The city was, and I just checked still quite clean. My friend said the reason was city took over the trash service (which got them in trouble with the IMF) and put out dumpsters every few blocks. Soon as it was 'free' people stopped dumping trash on the street. Two answer the question people at least there would carry a bag of trash a few blocks.
"""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.
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."
EminIsrafil|6 years ago
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, which I helped program, to track all the items.
vcdimension|6 years ago
deftnerd|6 years ago
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?
bgentry|6 years ago
More trash cans would be great, but they absolutely won't fix the problem when people regularly empty their contents onto the street.
steve19|6 years ago
atombender|6 years ago
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/S...
[2] https://i.redd.it/x0iye2nog6m31.jpg
MisterTea|6 years ago
DSNY, aka Sanitation, does not pick up trash from commercial businesses, only residencies. Businesses have to hire a private carter. Private carters are notorious for not giving two fucks. They have also been responsible for many pedestrian accidents as well.
I have never really noticed a surge in trash in the streets after DSNY comes by. Though, after schools opened, my house is around the corner from a public school and I see an immediate surge of snack wrappers tossed on my lawn. Same with the building I own near another school, wrapper trash all over.
ndespres|6 years ago
hapless|6 years ago
rob74|6 years ago
diogenescynic|6 years ago
Gibbon1|6 years ago
newnewpdro|6 years ago
irrational|6 years ago
Reedx|6 years ago
No, but for some reason people think throwing cigarette butts on the ground and out of car windows isn't littering.
brenden2|6 years ago
(Also I live in NYC these days, but I used to live in SF).
toomanybeersies|6 years ago
I never chuck my butts on the ground, if there isn't a rubbish bin nearby, I'll either put the butt back in my packet, or just put it in my pocket. When I see friends tossing their butts I always have a go at them for littering, most just don't even realise what they're doing is wrong.
CriticalCathed|6 years ago
eldenbishop|6 years ago
A study commissioned by SF Public Works in 2009 determined that the direct costs for cigarette related litter in San Francisco could be remediated with a 22 cent per pack tax. The actual tax in San Francisco is 85 cents per pack known as the "Cigarette Litter Abatement Fee". The 2009 study claimed around 30 million packs/year are sold in San Francisco which would be roughly 25 million dollars a year in taxes collected for this purpose with an estimated cleanup cost of only 7-8 million. So not only are cigarette smokers already paying for the cleanup they are paying nearly four times the actual cleanup cost for their litter.
The 2009 study: https://sfpublicworks.org/sites/default/files/tobacco_litter...
The tax: https://sftreasurer.org/cigarette
gdulli|6 years ago
codeddesign|6 years ago
roguecoder|6 years ago
I blame the lack of a real winter. In the northeast people quit smoking when it was banned indoors, because they didn't want to smoke in the freezing cold snow, whereas in SF people just go outside all year around.
hapless|6 years ago
cies|6 years ago
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.
IfOnlyYouKnew|6 years ago
It's unfortunately not realistic to do for every kind of wrapper. Although maybe a weight-based rough measurement might work: I. e. a cents/gram of packaging, and your recycling is spot-checked for contamination. It seems slightly too convoluted, invasive, and draconian even for me, a German green. But might be a possible application of AI ("estimate the number of product wrappings in this heap").
agota|6 years ago
eldenbishop|6 years ago
https://sftreasurer.org/cigarette
dmckeon|6 years ago
Monday, 4/22, was Earth Day, after Good Friday, Passover, Easter, and of course 4/20 - so a near-perfect storm for SF.
olliej|6 years ago
Tharkun|6 years ago
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?
lozaning|6 years ago
lxe|6 years ago
Gibbon1|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
waynecochran|6 years ago
cjensen|6 years ago
WalterBright|6 years ago
jxramos|6 years ago
I really like that approach to quantitate where the hotspots are and to deliver bins accordingly.
Animats|6 years ago
phil248|6 years ago
personlurking|6 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Vj8wb5jAs
amelius|6 years ago
pbhjpbhj|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
misterirony|6 years ago
jeromebaek|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
frostyj|6 years ago
yeah I guess so