CofC’s Office of Sustainability does a litter clean up every few weeks while using an app made by the SC Aquarium to collect data. I volunteered to participate in a litter pick up on March 8th and spent around an hour collecting debris from the corner of Calhoun and Coming. I partnered up with one of the OoS interns to take turns collecting trash and logging items in the app. Once you download the app you have to join “projects” for what exactly you’re doing because it’s a citizen science platform that many groups use to track different environmental or biological concerns. The OoS uses “litter-free digital journal” to log the items they pick up. The app categorizes the litter by composition and has options for the user to specify if the given categories don’t match.
In 1 hour, my partner and I collected around 317 individual pieces of litter. Most of these were cigarette butts or tobacco related debris. Because of the location where we collected trash, that wasn’t surprising as it’s a pretty busy street and has lots of foot traffic and there’s a short brick wall at the corner of a lot where people sit and smoke. There were fresh cigarette buts that were still round and orange but we also found lots of old butts that looked like dirty cotton balls picked apart. This corner would probably be a good spot for a cigarette butt receptacle, I’ve even heard of ones that are made using recycled butts.
The next most abundant litter were microplastics. There’s street parking pretty much all along where we collected trash, and there were little rigid fragments that looked like someone smashed their mirror on something, so we picked that up as well as a lot of other tiny plastics like pen caps or buttons. The 3rd most abundant litter was paper and cardboard, most of which was food related. These were mostly things like gum wrappers, straw wrappers, receipts and little scraps of paper.
This is the second litter clean up I’ve done using a Citizen Science app, and it was my first with CofC’s OoS! It was a fun way to be involved with other CofC students interested in conservation while picking up trash that would end up in our waterways otherwise. I like both apps but its nice that this one gives you an option to specify what exactly you’re finding, which also provides better data for the people reviewing the findings.
