Sanitation Solutions: How hidden cameras became Philly's fiercest weapon in the war on dumping

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.

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 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 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.

A Philadelphia-based program called I Love Thy Hood's stepped up to help attack the city's dirty streets problem. Fueled entirely by volunteer efforts, the program has placed more than 106 cans on blocks around the city and collected over 100,000 pounds of trash.

The volunteer-run nonprofit Futel operates free public phone booths in Portland, Oregon, that people can use to be connected with services, make calls, or simply chat with an operator. Each call is directed to all of the volunteer operators’ phones, and whoever picks up first addresses the needs of the person on the other end of the line.

After years of war left the city of Mosul without the greenery it had come to be known for, an initiative called Green Mosul organized a volunteer tree-planting campaign that aimed to bring together people of different backgrounds and religions and rebuild community bonds. Through the project, volunteers planted roughly 17,000 trees, and plans are in the works to replicate the effort in other post-conflict cities.

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.

Pennsylvania’s Perkiomen Watershed Conservancy has built a grassroots base of volunteers that help clean up the local environment. Through education at schools and summer workshops, outreach projects, and asking volunteers to recruit new people, the Conservancy saw over 1,000 volunteers at its annual stream cleanup event. While the organization is still trying to figure out how to retain volunteers for long-term projects, the response to immediate projects has been overwhelming.

Diverting trash from the landfill and into productive use is one way to help close the loop on consumer waste. In the Greek city of Thessaloniki, the Zero Waste Lab is turning plastic waste into new furniture for public spaces. The plastic is melted down and, using a 3D printer, reformed. The lab is supported by the Print Your City initiative, started by The New Raw a design studio based in the Netherlands, as well as by Coca-Cola.