Residents step up to clean city neighborhoods - Meet the Flint Litter Killers

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.

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.

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.

New York City’s Sanitation Commissions is cleaning up city streets with new practices and regulations curbing its trash problem. For example, she has started using data to track trash conditions across the city, she’s enforcing infractions, and she changed put-out and pick-up times.

What started as a small group of people taking pictures of waste in their communities and tagging it on Instagram with the hashtag #Litterati, turned into a global effort, and even an app, to map and dispose of trash. Users can upload to the app an image of trash and machine-learning algorithm can tag it location, material, and company who made it. The city of San Francisco asked the makers of the app for help documenting cigarette butts and tobacco products on its streets and ended up winning a legal victory over the tobacco industry to increase the taxes on their products.

Viral social media trends can be harnessed for social and environmental good. A social media#trashtag challenge that spread from Reddit to Instagram draws upon the satisfying nature of a before-and-after meme. People all over the world who participated in #trashtag challenge went out and beautified green spaces. They then posted photos of themselves surrounded by the trash bags they had collected.

For years, campaigns to clean Nepal's polluted Bagmati River resulted in failure. Now with police and government backing, the organization Safai Abhiyaan is in its third year, attracting hundreds of volunteers who are willing to brave the polluted waters to collect trash. The program's unique approach to organizing community volunteers has been a success, but the problem will not subside until greater perceptions about litter and water pollution are tackled.

Front Porch Forum is a social networking platform that allows local community members to connect, whether it be to sell items, get together and even support each other during tough times. Despite varying politics and beliefs, the Forum helps bridge a gap during a time when divisiveness is at a peak. There are currently more than 250 forums across the state, specific to each community.

Klean Kensington pays teenagers $15 an hour to clean lots in the Philadephia neighborhood and prevents them from turning to dealing drugs to make money.

Los Angeles organizations and neighborhoods are teaming up to create Green Alleys that mitigate flooding. These alleys consist of permeable pavement and native plants and trees that all help direct water underground, as well as streetlights and murals that make them welcoming community spaces.