Interesting study on litter focuses on the brand of the trash

2004.

When I was involved in the early days of H Street Main Street, a commercial district revitalization initiative for the H Street corridor in Northeast DC, one of the activities my committee did was a monthly litter cleanup.

I didn't want to do it--because the litter just comes back--but it was important to respond to the expressed needs of the volunteer committee members.

It was actually a great thing to do for creating visibility for the organization, for getting a handle on the problem, and for volunteer recruitment.

One of my earliest blog entries was on litter, as a result of those efforts. And I wrote more pieces over the years.

-- "Every litter bit hurts," 2005
-- "Litter revisited," 2006

Photo by Inked78.  700 block of H Street NE.

While we never did formal litter surveys, I was especially impressed by the litter survey methods of Keep Australia Beautiful, which tended to be much more detailed than the survey forms typically used in the US.  (In the US, Keep America Beautiful's biggest funders are industry, and I can't imagine industry wants too much detail on the nature of litter.)

My newsfeed had an article ("We studied 40,000 pieces of litter to find out where it all comes from – here's what we discovered," The Conversation) about a study in the UK, which was twofold: (1) like Keep Australia Beautiful, it was highly detailed about the types of litter; but (2) added a new dimension to the study, recording the brand of the litter.  From the article:

The community interest company Planet Patrol created an app for people to record the litter they find and remove. We used it to map the location, materials, type and, where possible, brands of 43,187 items of litter collected across the UK in 2020. Our research was recently published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.

Plastic was the most common material recorded, accounting for 63.1% of all items. Metal was second (14.3%), followed by composite materials (pieces of litter made from more than one material, like Tetrapak cartons) at 11.6%. Bottles, lids, straws and other items from the drinks industry made up 33.6% of the total, of which metal cans were the most common.

Our citizen scientists identified brands for 16,751 items (38.8% of the total), with 50% of these belonging to just ten brands. The Coca-Cola Company was the most frequently identified brand (11.9% of branded litter), followed by Anheuser-Busch InBev (7.4%) and PepsiCo (6.9%). The top three brands were all drinks manufacturers.

The article first suggests that based on the survey, some of the EU's emphasis on litter interdiction, focused on impact on rivers and the sea, is misdirected.  It also suggests naming the biggest sources of identifiable litter, as a way to change the actions of the companies and the behavior of users.

Should we name and shame?  Since most litter in the environment cannot be traced back to its origins, naming the people and organisations responsible may seem futile. But litter that can be linked with an industry or a company is some of the easiest to address. This is particularly true for packaging, which made up 59.1% of the items logged in our study.

Given how common this type of waste appears to be, expanding opportunities for people to refill containers with goods (where appropriate), removing or reducing the need for new packaging as zero-waste shops do, is a good idea. This will require collaboration between companies, industries and governments. Small-scale efforts to achieve this are underway, with Wales pledging to become the first refill nation (where people can easily refill water bottles, making bottled water obsolete), some supermarkets introducing or trialling refill aisles and The Coca-Cola Company’s various small-scale efforts to allow consumers to refill bottles with beverages, most notably in Latin America.

It's definitely a transformational approach, one that hadn't occurred to me before.

-- "Planet Patrolling: A citizen science brand audit of anthropogenic litter in the context of national legislation and international policy," Journal of Hazardous Materials (2022)