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?
Felipe 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.
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.
This 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.
Zero litter at the event, but yeah, some people are hella irresponsible w/ disposing of the trash after they've left the event. They're not just throwing it on the ground (that I've seen, anyway), but they're leaving it in any random trash can they can find, rather than paying to dump it (which there is ample opportunity to do -- a cottage industry springs up of people taking trash for $5 a bag post BM).
Probably burning man should just include end-of-event trash disposal in the ticket price, and have an official collection area people can dump their trash. (Probably some reluctance on BM part to do this 'cuz of the somewhat-inaccurate "radical self-reliance" principle.)
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.
I frequently see DSNY workers spill trash around when it's been improperly bagged, or the bag rips, or similar things. That shouldn't matter, but they don't care.
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.
having 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.
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).
I've noticed this too. If you have a dog, you also learn very quickly just how many discarded chicken bones exist throughout the city (hint: it's more than you want it to be).
I completely agree. I clean up with Emin and rubbish, and this project was initially inspired because I have a corgi vacuum cleaner who eats everything on the ground. Once I started scanning, it's impossible to unsee the litter. So we started cleaning and recording it!
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'm not sure that many smokers still believe butts are biodegradable, but I could certainly be wrong.
I suspect (as an exsmoker) that it's more about the availability of cigarette receptacles. most smokers I know are willing to dispose of butts when there's a convenient place to put them, but are not willing to carry them around until they find a suitable place. used cigarettes make your clothes smell a lot worse that merely smoking outside.
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.
I guess. When I was really poor, I rolled my own cigarettes. And when I finished one, I kept the tobacco in a small plastic bag. As backup, for when I was too poor to buy more.
You may say "yuck". But trust me, good tobacco the second time around is better than the stuff in those nasty папироса.
You take the tobacco from a butt, loosen it up, and air dry it. Then you roll it into another cigarette. Maybe mix with some fresh tobacco, for a milder taste. People don't typically smoke cigarettes down to a roach. Except for those Russian ones, with the paper tubes.
Even if that is true, it is more likely the result of poverty being inherently stressful and requiring the use of cognitive resources rich people can spend on other things (https://zhaolab.psych.ubc.ca/pdfs/Zhao_2013_Science.pdf)
I don't have a reference, but I believe coffee cups are assumed to be recyclable even though actually, and in most part due to the polyethylene-lined inside, they are not.
And here I am thinking it was a wax lining. Why would you a plastic lining for something you put hot liquid in, which would cause leeching? (Not that was doesn't have issues, aka melting)
Try putting some hot water in a "cup" you make from paper and you may find that the thin plastic barrier makes some functional sense.
I agree however, that I'd rather just use re-usable glass or metal cup (with a handle or suitable insulated wrappping) and avoid the potential for hot liquids leaching things out of plastic!
Cigarette filters are made from cellulose acetate, which you could consider a plastic although it's not a petrochemical (it's the same plastic commonly used in eyeglass frames).
However, a used cigarette butt will additionally contain adhesives and any flavorings as well as some leftover compounds deposited by the smoke. The wikipedia article goes into higher detail on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_filter
> Cellulose is readily biodegraded by organisms that utilize cellulase enzymes, but due to the additional acetyl groups cellulose acetate requires the presence of esterases for the first step in biodegradation. Once partial deacetylation has been accomplished either by enzymes, or by partial chemical hydrolysis, the polymer’s cellulose backbone is readily biodegraded.
I.e. if you throw butts in an ordinary compost pile, they might not get anywhere for a while.
Are they all? I've always assumed they were plastic, surprised this hasn't been raised to my notice before, eg in advertising "our cigarettes are entirely compostable" or something.
Tar, and other tobacco detritus, isn't really dangerous: The asphalt it's lying on is actually very similar, chemically.
Cigarette butts without the filter are easily degraded organic (carbon) compounds. You can compost them and will get perfectly acceptable potting soil.
Same story for the various additives. As a rule, anything that has a physiological effect and isn't a heavy metal is biodegradable.
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.
It's somewhat heavy, but not extraordinarily so. The average smoker consumes just under a pack a day. A heavy smoker might go through two or three packs a day.
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").
States in the USA have been doing this for years too. 10 cents for bottles and cans in California, and you just don't really see them on the street for this reason. What you do see is... everything else.
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?
Companies 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.
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?
That 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.
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.
One data point: litter bins (public trash cans) were all removed from Central London decades ago because terrorists began planting bombs in them. Afaik they have been restored in recent years but the cultural memory of having to pack your trash home remains.
I'd heard this for ages, but Tokyo in my experience had a lot of places to leave your trash. Not the giant trash cans I see stateside, but small bins next to many of the vending machines which are everywhere. The streets were pretty clear of litter though. The lack of litter was still impressive.
You have to have a recycling bin next to drink machines. These bins are only for bottles and cans, though. You shouldn't put trash in them. Convenience stores are required to have trash bins, so that's the easiest place to dispose of something if you need to.
I don't think this has anything to do with terrorism, though. There is a culture of take your trash home with you. Even at work I was not allowed to use the trash bin for anything except work trash. Trash from my lunch, etc, I had to take home.
It seems to be extremly impolite to put anything into the vending machine bins but the bottles you bought from that exact machine though. My Japanese friends were visibly uncomfortable at the idea. Same for any convenience store bins - only what you bought there is fine.
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).
Absolutely. I think litter is entirely a cultural/social issue.
It might be a little trite but I sometimes think the Eastern approach of Shame is more effective than the Western approach of Guilt in curbing small social transgressions.
Shame and guilt are really two sides of the same medal, aren't they? As in: guilt is evolutionary internalised avoidance of shame.
And, yes, it's an extremely strong mechanism. Most emotions are basically evolutionary implementations of government: shame -> criminal law, pity -> social safety net, etc.
Shaming is getting a bad rep these days, but it's essentially the least invasive method a society has to enforce common standards of decency.
It's more a culture thing in Japan. If you're Japanese, and litter, you will get shamed by passersby so hard that you'll never do it again. People in the US won't do that nearly as often, and people in the US aren't as affected by shame as much as people in Japan.
You can't really use Japan as a model for any place outside of Japan. You can't make San Francisco's residents behave like Tokyo's any more than you can make Ruth Bader Ginsburg the left tackle for the Dallas Cowboys.
Japan is culturally very different. Every Japanese person is taught at school how to act in society. Cultural values are instilled there. In the west we believe that parents should have the last say on how to bring up children. In Japan, teachers have the last say. Teachers go to students' homes to make sure it is an acceptable environment for the student. If it is not, parents are required to take classes on how to be better parents. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen teachers calling in parents and yelling at them for hours until the parents, sobbing, promise to improve. One of my students was caught smoking and since the father was a smoker he was called into school. The vice principal blamed the father for the student's behaviour and insisted that the father never again smoke at home. The father agreed (and you know the home room teacher is going to go over to the house to make sure the agreement is kept).
That's why people don't litter here. For a test, I once left my change in the drink machine by the school -- a drink machine used by all the students. The change was still there 2 weeks later! I think the only reason it eventually was removed was because the company that restocked the machines took it. Probably only because they realised that it was an inconvenience for everyone having to sort out their correct change.
You just can't tell a city of millions of people to act like that ;-). It's a completely different culture and a completely different set of values.
If the cliché is to be believed, there are some downsides to this level of obedience, such as stifling people in their most creative years, or really any opposite of one would expect a meritocracy to achieve. Some would probably consider your description of parent-teacher relations to be borderline dystopian.
I really wonder if those societal traits are necessarily linked, i. e. by being opposite ends of a spectrum of selfishness. It would seem entirely practical not to litter and also not expect people to mindlessly follow orders (in life and at work) based on the completely arbitrary hierarchy of age (/ gender).
Truly hard to say. I can say that I like the way things work in Japan. Even though I have no kids, people often ask me if I would put them in Japanese schools. I'd practically insist on it. However, I know several expats who hate these things.
One of the things I've come to realise is that one person's dystopia is another's utopia. I've often felt that living in Japan is a bit like living in a real life "Leave it to Beaver" or "Andy Griffith's show" (especially out in the countryside where I live). I see Japan slowly getting more and more Westernised and it fills me with dread. I lived for nearly 40 years in a society that I really disliked and when I moved to Japan, to my surprise, it was like coming home to a home I had never known. It's 12 years later and I am just getting more and more Japanese.
Japanese people, in general, also like Japanese culture. If you ask a Japanese person why they don't litter, I will lay pretty good odds that the answer will be, "Because I am Japanese". That's really the only answer. You're very unlikely to get an in depth answer about it being good for the environment, or a socially responsible thing to do. People really enjoy this identity. It's one of the reasons that there are relatively few Japanese people who live for long periods abroad.
I guess the thing is that most people are happy in Japan, in the same way that most people are happy in other first world countries. Some people are very unhappy, of course, but I can't really point to a country where that isn't the case. Some things are screwed up, but most things work very well -- just like any other first world country. I should point out that I've lived in Canada, the US and the UK for long periods of time as well, so I've got a pretty good basis for comparison.
Could there be a middle ground between how Japan works and how countries like Canada and the US work? Maybe, but I think you would have a lot of struggles to find the balance to make it work. You would also almost certainly lose very, very good things on both sides and I'm not sure that you would find very, very good things to replace them with.
A city can’t take any steps to make its people Japanese. Japan is a behavioral outlier, so the techniques it uses are not applicable to the rest of the population.
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.
My city started charging £5 for a "bulky item pickup", which needs to be booked 2 months in advance (I just checked). Unsurprisingly, we now get mattresses/furniture dumped on the side of the street for a week.
"""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.
I'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.
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.
It 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.
It'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.
No 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.
"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."
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.