Hire a Kick-Ass Trash Czar

Philadelphia has 300 surveillance cameras and, increasingly, sees them as central to its strategy of holding individuals accountable for illegal dumping. This has led to empty lots remaining garbage free, and setting examples of those who are caught and prosecuted.

Mysuru has become a gleaming example for solutions to India's vaster struggles with solid-waste management, toilet construction, sanitation strategy, public outreach, and other measures. The city uses a decentralized model that leverages a mix of municipal resources, NGO leadership, civil society, and cooperation from proud residents and businesses.

The Gombe State Environmental and Protection Agency in Nigeria cleared waste from waterways in metropolitan areas to increase the flow of water and mitigate flood risk.

The street cleaning startup Glitter facilitates paid cleanups on blocks that slip through the cracks of the City’s waste management services. The company has cleaners assigned to blocks in every section of the city, with new people jumping on board each week to help clean up the streets.

City Plants, an organization in Los Angeles, is partnering with other nonprofits, government agencies, scientists, and residents to create a more equitable urban forest throughout the city. By working together and using technology, they have planted more than 65,000 trees to combat climate change, systemic racism, and high temperatures that affect all Angelenos.

Keep Athens-Clarke County Beautiful uses the Marine Debris Tracker app to motivate locals to reduce and clean up litter. The app collects information from locals about the type and location of litter they see to inform what abatement efforts are needed there.

The Cleaner Lagos project works to clean up the state, aiming toward maintaining a clean and healthy environment at all times. From waste management services to incentivized waste sorting and stricter regulations, the project has helped to reduce the spread of diseases caused by poor sanitation across the state.

The Flint Michigan Litter Killers formed in 2020 and has since grown to be a group with over 800 members who travel around the city to clean up trash from their streets and neighborhoods.

The former Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island is turning into a public park that will accept visitors in 2021. By capping the trash site with plastic, covering it with soil, and planting native grasses, city officials are restoring the area’s former tidal wetlands and scrublands; nearly 314 plant and animal species have already been sighted. While the successful closing of the dump nearly 20 years ago means that the trash is being sent to other neighborhoods in the United States where people dealing with economic hardship live, the project could be a model for sustainability and urban renewal.

Reducing landfill waste takes a comprehensive approach. By implementing city-wide composting alongside trash collection and utilizing the sorting technology of Recology, the city’s municipal waste recovery company, San Francisco has significantly reduced the amount of waste residents send to landfills. Although it missed the ambitious target of achieving zero waste by 2020, the city aims to cut what it sends to landfills in half by 2030.