SOCIAL MEDIA CLEANS UP PARKS
19 Mar 2019
A social media campaign aimed at changing the environment has seen people around the world come together to clean up public parks, beaches and wilderness areas overrun by plastic waste.
It is rare when a social media trend actually results in a physical change to the environment, especially when it comes to picking up plastic waste. But a new viral challenge has thousands of people from around the world coming together to clean up places that have become overrun with plastic.
The new challenge, #trashtag, encourages people to clean up litter and share photos from before and after the clean-up job is over. So far, tens of thousands of individuals have participated in the social media challenge. These participants have cleaned up roads, parks, beaches and wilderness areas. The challenge has also increased awareness of important environmental issues, like how much plastic waste ends up in the trash.
While the challenge only recently went viral, it actually started a few years ago. A company called UCO Gear came up with the idea in 2015 to help with its wilderness protection program. The challenge did not catch on until this year, after a post on Facebook tagged “tired teens” in the photo. Since then, there have been well over 25,000 posts with #trashtag tagged, although it has a few other variations, such as #trashchallenge and #trashtagchallenge.
Although it is great to see people cleaning up the environment in their free time, conservationists hope it will eventually lead to bigger changes. According to BBC, the director of Canada’s Ecology Action Centre (EAC), Mark Butler, hopes the hashtag gets people to understand why we need to eliminate single-use plastics altogether.
Image epSos.de