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2018 Our Clean Community Group during training
Global scales of plastic pollution research have helped to aid in policy recommendations to state and global governments. With the aid of new microscale phone enabled technologies from Litterati and Marine Debris Tracker, we may begin to resolve our questions about anthropogenic litter and plastic pollution to local communities.
This project will advance the objectives of up and coming applied scientists. Participants will lead their own local research project on anthropogenic litter guided by resources and expertise from Dr. Win Cowger. Participants will learn about field data collection, data management, GIS, and modeling and will have the opportunity to have their name on an academic paper. Participants will clean up a street block in their local community three times a week for a month, while collecting detailed information on the materials, items, and brands that make up the constituents of the trash. No previous experience in research is needed and there will be a lot of opportunity for learning.
The primary objective of this research is to use science to make a difference in our local community. We will explore dynamics like overfilled trash cans, littering, infrequent street sweeping, illegal dumping, wind transport, and other questions that cannot be revealed at any other scales besides the micro. All data will be time stamped, photographed, and georeferenced creating a trustworthy dataset rich in evidence. Participants visibility in their community during this project may encourage other community members to join the project and make participants the de facto litter ambassador of their community. The conclusion of this research will be an academic paper or many with all dedicated and committed contributors listed as coauthors. This paper will be presented to the local government who we will also consult along the way.
- Measure litter generation rates around the world.
- Assess why we see higher and lower litter generation rates in different places.
- Determine how litter arrives at the location we find it.
- Quantify the efficacy of litter prevention efforts.
- Share data open access and foster open science. (Data in this repository is explained in the ReadMe.md file)
Determine a manageable location on your street to clean up and record data three times a week for a month. The site should be large enough to that you would find at least 100 piece of trash on your first survey but not so large that you would need to record more than 1000 piece on your first survey. An initial visit to assess the amount of litter will be helpful for determining how large the location should be. The site should either be a park or public space or a stretch of road where both sides of the road are surveyed. Draw it on a map, and send it to Win via email at wincowger@gmail.com. It is important that you think you can feasibly clean up the entire area three times a week and that you can accurately find the boundaries in the real world that you drew on the map. Zoom in on the map to outline it very clearly and precisely. The site should encompass both sides of the road and not extend into private property. See the more specific instructions for greater details on how to create your site.
Example:
Imagery @2021 County of San Bernardino Maxar Technologies, U.S. Geological Survey. USDA Farm Service Agency. Map Data @2021 Google.
- Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.litterati.android&hl=en
- Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/litterati/id982782776?mt=8
- Join the “Our Clean Community” group in the app.
- Safety first, be aware of cars on the road and don’t go into the road if there are moving vehicles.
- Any method step can be broken for the sake of safety or respect for your community, just record any alterations to the methodology.
- Cover the area systematically, eg. by walking it abreast, in bands or otherwise subdividing it for complete coverage. Do not walk in the center of the road but if you see trash from the sidewalk and it is safe to grab the trash you may retrieve it.
- Whenever you encounter a piece of trash, photo graph it (see below), label it with the item, material, and brand tags (see below), and clean it up.
- Continue this for the entire survey site for each survey day to cleanup and photograph every piece of litter there on each day.
- Do not record litter outside of the survey area.
- Continue these surveys 3 times a week for a month.
Example of a good quality image:
- Take the photo as soon as you find the trash.
- Take only one photo of each object.
- Take the photo within 1 m of where the trash lays.
- Have a ruler in the photo to scale the size of the items.
- It is best to take photos of a single object at a time but it is sometimes necessary to take a photo of multiple objects at the same time in the case of one item being broken into many. If photographing multiple objects, place only similar things in an image together.
- Photos should be close up but you should be able to see the entire item with enough background behind it to tell if it is against a fence, on the curb, in the street ect.
- Any brands on the objects should be visible in the image.
- If there is a pile of trash, deconstruct the pile and take photos of like objects together in one image or photograph each piece individually.
- If there is a bag full of more than 10 items of trash just photograph the bagful.
- If there are items that cannot be removed because they are hazardous or too large, photograph them once on the day they are spotted and take note of them if they disappear or move.
- Open up receipts so that the entire receipt can be read from the image.
- Photograph anything the size of a cigarette butt (approximately 1 cm) and larger.
- Retake any photos that do not meet the quality expectations of this study including blurry photos or photos that do not have the entire object in view.
Example of quality categorization:
- Label the material, item, and brand of each object in the app.
- Use the words from the trash terms sheet for materials and item identification and copy the name exactly, spaces and all.
- If there is a material or item not on the list you can create a new one and use that term each time you encounter that object.
- If the object is a mix of many materials use the most abundant (by volume) material in the mixture.
- If there are many objects write them all.
- Add the brand name as a tag if there is one or leave it blank.
Once you are done with your survey, notify Win via email wincowger@gmail.com to get your full dataset compiled from the database. Win will provide it to you and you will go through and manually verify all of the data. During verification you will add a note column to the data file and make down any observations of these occurances:
- Duplicate images
- Image not of trash
- Tag incorrect: correct tag is...
- The piece is not for this study area
You may end up with a lot of trash collected, this trash is now your property so you can do whatever you would like with it. Here are some things we like to do with trash:
- Reuse it: if you find a 5$ bill, that is yours, buy yourself something nice.
- Upcycle it: make an art piece.
- Recycle it: check your local guidance on what can be recycled and how.
- Waste it: if none of the above are possible, throw it in your trash bin or take to the local landfil.
- Hashtag #OurCleanCommunity when posting to social media.
- Invite others to join the group.
Publication in review now, results of the first study will be released soon.
- Over 20 researchers have contributed to the project so far.
Contact Project Coordinator Win Cowger wincowger@gmail.com