How the #trashtagchallenge Made Cleaning Up Litter Go Viral
#trashtag founder Steven Reinhold after a cleanup
I was road-tripping through California, and my destination was Wild Willy's Hot Spring – a veritable, volcanic-oasis on the outskirts of Mammoth, CA.
The night before, I had "cowboy-camped" under the stars at the base of Mt. Whitney, and I was feeling particularly connected with nature. While cruising northbound on Highway 395, a sudden and shearing crosswind rattled my ride and jettisoned a paper receipt out of the passenger window and into the picturesque Owens Valley.
In the rearview, I watched it float away in the breeze like a trashy tumbleweed.
As I steadied course, a visceral and overwhelming feeling of disgust set in. The lost receipt was from a frivolous gear binge on trucker hats and touristy t-shirts back in Bishop, CA. My gut told me that I should have stopped — I should have ventured out into the desert and removed that heinous relic of my self-indulgent shopping spree.
But I just kept on driving northbound on my California cruise. I drove in complete silence, inwardly haunted by the inadvertent littering fiasco. My karma account felt indebted, and I needed to atone for this unfortunate event, so emphatically, I vowed to gather one hundred pieces of trash during the rest of the trip!
Over the next few days, I proudly explored California in eco-warrior mode. My adventurous spirit — and careless littering from others — lead me to find trash in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, on the summit of Mt. Whitney, all over Yosemite Valley, and even on the remote summit of Cathedral Peak in Yosemite National Park.
After cleaning up in the Sierra Nevada, I continued north on my tour of California, all the way to the evergreen-blanketed slopes of Mt. Shasta. Shasta is a sacred place for me, and it was cathartic to relieve the landscape of its trashy burden!
By this point in the trip, I became exceedingly excited about finding trash while simultaneously growing worried about how pervasive our trash problem had become.
Fast-forward a few days and a few dozen more cleanups, and I had finally found my way to my favorite place on Earth — Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Fittingly, it was there, at the foot of my favorite mountain – The Grand Teton – where I found my one-hundredth piece of trash and finally settled the debt I owed over the receipt, which flew out of my window weeks before.
I reached down in one victorious swoop and tagged a tattered granola wrapper from the shores of Jenny Lake — the thrill of victory and pride in my accomplishment overwhelmed me.
An endorphin fueled cocktail of confidence circulated within and made my mind explode with the possibilities of furthering this cleanup quest! I profoundly pondered — if I could convince 100 people to join me in picking up our wild places, then together, we could make a tangible difference.
And if I could convince one hundred people to join, we could collectively convince thousands of people to join.
And with the power and connectivity of social media, we could conceivably pick up a million pieces of trash, together!
During these elations and jumbled delusions of grandeur, an idea formed and sprung from my mouth as quickly as the receipt had jettisoned from my window — #TRASHTAG!
#trashtag founder Steven Reinhold
It was an epic epiphany — Instead of taking self-fulfilling summit selfies, we should be cleaning up our wild places and taking "#trashtag" pictures of ourselves on our adventures! It was a pretty simple concept — all you would have to do was post a picture of yourself picking up trash — and I truly believed that with the galvanizing force of social media that #trashtag was destined to make a difference.
Ideas are cheap, but the execution is priceless — I needed help to get the #trashtag project started.
In the early stages, I partnered with an outdoor gear company called UCO Gear to help launch the project and early on in the endeavor, #trashtag got a considerable boost when the outdoor media outlets Backpacker Magazine and Teton Gravity Research published stories and invited all of their followers to join the cleanup movement.
#trashtag was picking up at a strong pace, and the movement stayed steady for three years before hitting the big time in 2019.
Before and after a cleanup picture by Drici Younes was posted by Byron Roman. Byron's original post of Drici's before-and-after cleanup effort wasn't originally tagged with #trashtag or #trashtagchallenge. Still, the powers of social media quickly worked their magic and connected it to #trashtag and #trashtagchallenge, sending the cleanup movement into a viral wave across the Planet!
The #trashtagchallenge ushered in an era that made picking up #trashtag's cooler than ice-cold! It wasn't just your typical eco-friendly individuals picking up and posting their efforts. There were people from every age, race, and gender from everywhere on earth joining the movement.
Youth, in particular, were extra inspired to pick up, and their technological prowess was key to the widespread success of the movement. The #trashtagchallenge popularized picking up and posting before-and-after pictures of cleanup efforts, and the world more than rose to the challenge.
#trashtag did not invent the idea of picking up trash, posting pictures of cleanup efforts, or social-media-activism — #trashtag simply combined and aligned those endeavors into a cohesive force for good.
By design, #trashtag is simple, easily-translatable, and open to interpretation, and it has galvanized millions of individuals to utilize their social media networks to pick up the Planet. The very best part of tracking #trashtag's growth has been seeing how individuals and organizations from across the Planet have adapted #trashtag to work with their own cleanup efforts.
We can collectively make a difference, and I'm stoked that #trashtag is paving the way for people to pick up the planet!