
We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF - EminIsrafil
https://medium.com/rubbish-love/130-000-reasons-why-data-science-can-help-clean-up-san-francisco-6412eba1e374
======
EminIsrafil
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.

We used the [https://www.rubbish.love](https://www.rubbish.love), which I
helped program, to track all the items.

~~~
vcdimension
Have 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
I've seen this, and it is rather sad:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iux2OV3w4NI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iux2OV3w4NI)

~~~
vcdimension
Hahaha!! 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)

------
bgentry
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.

~~~
steve19
There 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
In 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
And the have this subtle dystopian message on each one

"Waste Please"

[https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&q=Waste+Please+Dis...](https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&q=Waste+Please+Disneyland&tbm=isch)

------
atombender
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.

[1] [https://www.ediblegeography.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/07/S...](https://www.ediblegeography.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/07/Splotchy-pavement.jpg)

[2] [https://i.redd.it/x0iye2nog6m31.jpg](https://i.redd.it/x0iye2nog6m31.jpg)

~~~
MisterTea
> 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.

~~~
atombender
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.

~~~
Craighead
and I constantly see private sanitation companies driving on the wrong side of
the road, picking up half the litter they should, and then speeding off

Anecdotes dont mean much

~~~
atombender
So they're both bad. My point is that not only do _people_ litter, the normal
trash-handling process is also failing.

------
diogenescynic
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).

~~~
Gibbon1
If you report to the city they'll fine them for that.

------
irrational
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?

~~~
Reedx
> 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
They are returning the gifts of the tobacco plant to the Earth

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Along with the dino juice for the filter. It's a circle of life.

------
cies
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.

~~~
agota
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?

~~~
matthewowen
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.

~~~
agota
I 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
Because it's easier to punish the people who enable it.

~~~
agota
I don't understand why you see companies packaging their products as enabling
littering.

If a company produces a product, and then someone uses that product to commit
a crime, did the company enable the criminal?

Do you apply this reasoning to any other crimes?

------
dmckeon
> 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.

------
olliej
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

~~~
lxe
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).

~~~
paggle
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.

~~~
lxe
Both are big cities with people in them. Not sure why one can't learn from the
other and vice-versa.

~~~
mikekchar
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.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
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).

~~~
mikekchar
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.

------
waynecochran
I am surprised that poop wasn't mentioned. Nor drug paraphernalia. That kills
the attractiveness of SF far more than anything else.

~~~
cjensen
Both were mentioned, you just missed it :-)

~~~
waynecochran
You're right. One single sentence with the poop emoji used and the mention of
used needles. No wonder I missed it.

------
WalterBright
I once visited Ogden, Utah, on business. The city was remarkably free of
litter.

------
jxramos
"""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.

------
Animats
Wait until DNA reading gets cheap enough to be used for this. Then we can
downgrade the social credit scores of litterers.

~~~
phil248
Most 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
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.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
Government-run programs almost always take the form of needle _exchanges_. By
requiring their return, they actually prevent littering.

------
personlurking
A 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)

------
amelius
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Do people still chew gum?

~~~
exolymph
I mean... yes? Did you think that people had stopped chewing gum?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

------
misterirony
I thought this would be a recent batch review…

------
jeromebaek
Treat the symptoms, not the disease. Way to go!

------
frostyj
"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

