Literary Review for #TrashTag (Final Social Media Project)


Literature Review: What is the importance and impact of the social media phenomena #TrashTag challenge? 


From eating tide pods to jumping out of moving cars, internet challenges have been, at best, extremely silly and at worst, extremely dangerous. In today’s day and age, really anything can be brought to life through the use of social media and most times, these phenomenons spread like wildfire through the use of virtual platforms. However, the latest one – the #trashtag challenge – is getting people to clean up littered public and natural spaces. As evidence of their efforts, participants post before and after pictures on social media, then nominate another person to clean up a space, letting the process continue and flourish on.

The Eco-Media Magic of the #TrashTag

Although the #trashtag has been around since 2015, when it was part of a campaign by the outdoor pursuits brand UCO, it recently blew up as a result of a post on the community discussion forum Reddit – where a user named Byron Román suggested it would be a good global challenge “to make the world a better place” and essentially urged for his followers to spread the challenge with their own social platform networks.

While the project seemed to initially die down in intensity by the end of 2016, March 2019 had a revival of the project in the form of the #Trashtag challenge that took to all social media platforms and created everyone’s inner green thumbs to emerge. And like with everything on the Internet, the challenge soon went viral across the world with individuals and groups posing before and after photos of littered spaces that they took the time to clean up. Most users were collecting every piece of refuse they could find, throwing it into a plastic trash back and posting the results to social media.

With the re-emergence of the #trashtag challenge, Reddit had gone wild with the idea, #trashtag gaining more than 1,000 subscribers in the first weekend it began to get shared by social media users. From the first participants being involved within the challenge, it quickly turned global and had individuals from countries around the world sharing pictures of themselves cleaning up beaches, parks, schools, streets, and even their own backyards. Byron Román’s original post on Facebook that was linked back to his Reddit account, has now been shared over 332,000 times with over 105k likes. In result, the #Trashtag now holds more than 35,000 posts on Instagram, and hundreds of thousands more on Facebook and Twitter. The #Trashtag challenge has essentially become a global sensation, with people from China to England to the U.S all taking part in the challenge and sharing the evidence online.

With choosing to collect data with this phenomena, I had to take an approach that would put me into contact with data that not only showed the impact of trash on an environment but also to show how the actions of individuals completely changed said environment and how it was important within the community on a smaller scale factor. I had to find data that would show littered areas within public environments being completely transformed once individuals decided to participate within the #Trashtag challenge.

The Trash Problem

Not only does litter cause massive damage to our oceans, wildlife, and the world, it also costs billions of dollars each year to clean. According to National Geographic, of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic that have been produced globally, 6.3 billion metric tons have become plastic waste. “Of that, only nine percent has been recycled. The vast majority-- 79 percent -- is accumulating in landfills or sloughing off in the natural environment as litter,” they reported last year. And that’s just plastic waste alone which takes more than “400 years to naturally degrade”.

If that doesn’t cause alarm, as of September 2018, a report presented by the World Bank’s new What A Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050 stated that without urgent action “global waste will increase by 70 percent on current levels by the year 2050”. The report went further by explaining that “in the year of 2018 alone, the world generated 242 million tons of plastic waste that resulted in 1.6 billion tons of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere.  With large statistics such as these, it is no surprise that big celebrities such as Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio and youtuber, Zach King, have taken their own individual approaches towards the challenge and have encouraged their fan bases to do the same in order to get the attention the #TrashTag deserves in time of this emergence of an eco-crisis. These three celebrities have used their status’ of fame to highlight the dangers of our environmental crisis and have each used their social media platforms to emphasis the trend and call for further action.

The Importance of the Challenge

Knowing the detrimental state of trash affecting our environment, it is clear to see why a viral social media challenge like #Trashtag is so important. By having platforms advertise this challenge, it brings awareness to the issue and motivates everyone to do their part in taking care of our only planet and home, Earth. In an interview with news channel CBS New York, a participant of the #Trashtag said: "It's a great opportunity to really care for your environment. If you have 5 minutes today, grab a bag and pick up a handful of trash in your neighborhood. Every effort, even if small, truly makes a difference."


Works Cited
https://www.snewsnet.com/press-release/uco-launches-trashtag-project-to-keep-nature-beautiful

https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/az3ejn/this_should_be_the_new_challenge_to_make_the/?utm_source=reddit-android&depth=2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqQ_Fj-RqNY

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/plastic-produced-recycling-waste-ocean-trash-debris-environment/

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