Unfortunately, when taking a walk through the trails or looking out the window while driving down a county road, the green landscape is freckled with spots of white newspapers, yellow grocery bags and brown coffee cups. Today, most of us consider ourselves environmentally conscious people; bringing tote bags to the farmers market, refilling our glass water-bottles, recycling at home; but litter is a harsh reality. There is a movement on the rise with a vision for a litter free world, it is using social media to promote and actively engage the global community to support this vision, and this movement is called Litterati.
Litterati 101: you find a piece of litter, you photograph of this piece of litter with Instagram and tag the photo using the hashtag #litterati then you throw out, recycle or compost the piece of litter. Simple enough but why share a photo of a piece of litter on your Instagram page? Why not just pick it up and throw it out? It’s all about connectivity!
All over the world people are tagging the litter they find and creating a record of the impact in the “digital landfill”; a photo gallery of the collected photos that people were taking tagged #litterarti.
As more and more people get involved in this movement, the geo-tabbed location and time stamped data collected is so important; with this information we can analyse patterns of litter. We can take this information to our local government officials to advocate for more trash cans and recycling receptacles in the locations that are more prone to litter. Also, as people tag what litter items they are finding from specific stores or companies then we can try to create a conversation with these companies and work with them to possibly use more environmentally conscious packaging, or promote how to properly dispose of their trash on the product. We know these companies are not directly responsible for litter in our communities but their packaging materials are working their way into our parks and rivers and it isn’t good for the environment or their brand.
The vision of Litterati is to create a litter free planet, the plan is a simultaneous approach bottom-up as well as top-down. The bottom-up plan is a grass-roots, community based approach that people in the community go and find litter and throw it away reducing the amount of litter in our parks, rivers and backyards. And top-down, using the data collected to work with cities and companies to promote more garbage receptacles and work towards a litter free world.
Here at rare, our land management team works hard to ensure rare is a litter free place. We often find garbage being dumped at on the trails and various parts of the property. Please when you are walking the trails, remember: leave only footprints, take only pictures and kill only time.
You can become involved by joining the Litterati movement and tagging a photo of litter with the hashtag #litterati, or join a local volunteer garbage clean up like the ones here at rare. Remember to stay safe when picking up garbage and use gloves if you can.
Initiatives like Litterati are creating a global connection between environmental conscious citizens.
By: Cheyanne Richardson
The rare Blog 