ROTAMIRROR MARCH ISSUE RotaMirror, March Issue 2019, Rct Club of Kololo | Page 6

#Trashtag:
The online challenge of
cleaning places up
It’s not often that a viral hashtag on social media goes, well,
beyond social media.
But an online challenge encouraging users to clean up places has
seen tens of thousands of people doing just that.
In the Trashtag Challenge, users pick a place filled with litter,
clean it up, and post before and after pictures.
Volunteers have made beaches, parks and roads trash-free while
also raising awareness of the quantity of plastic litter we produce.
This group in Novosibirsk, Russia, said they had collected 223
bags of litter, 75% of which would be sent for recycling. The
challenge was reportedly created in 2015 by outdoor company
UCO Gear as part of a campaign to protect wilderness areas.
But a Facebook post last week directed at “tired teens” has
apparently given it new life and made the hashtag viral.
Here is a new #challenge for all you bored teens. Take a
photo of an area that needs some cleaning or maintenance,
then take a photo after you have done something about it,
and post it.
Posted by Byron Román on Tuesday, 5 March 2019
On Instagram alone, there were more than 25,000 posts with the
hashtag #trashtag - variations include #trashtagchallenge and
#trashchallenge.
In Spanish, it has been translated to #BasuraChallenge
But where does it go from here?
“Getting plastic out of the environment is important,” Mark
Butler, policy director of the Canadian environmental charity
Ecology Action Centre (EAC) told Halifax’s Star newspaper.
“We need to do more than go behind the people that are littering
and clean it up. We need to turn off the plastic tap,” he said,
adding that he hoped the campaign would lead to fundamental
changes over single-use plastics, for example.
“There’s the waste hierarchy, which is to refuse, reduce, reuse,
recycle. If we don’t do that stuff, then all we’ll be doing is cleaning
up the litter with no end in sight.”
Adopted by
Sharone .N. Kirabo
from BBC World News
ROTAMIRROR March Issue 2019
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