Final Paper: #TrashTag (Social Media Project)
The Social Media Phenomena of the #TrashTag Challenge
By: Lannette Bone
Introduction
There is no denying that social media has become a powerful tool that has rooted itself in the lives of millions across the globe and not only continues to have the effect of connecting individuals, but also brings attention to online phenomena's that trend on massive scales as well. 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 and has been taken up by society with refreshing acceptance. 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.
With this project, I decided to approach the workings behind the #TrashTag Challenge and further look into why the phenomena went viral on a worldwide scale when the topic of climate change is such a huge element of debate within today's current society. To do so, I researched the #TrashTag across various online platforms to find what people were saying and posting regarding the challenge and I took the data that I collected and analyzed why the #TrashTag was both important among the online users as well as what exactly the data showed.
With this project, I decided to approach the workings behind the #TrashTag Challenge and further look into why the phenomena went viral on a worldwide scale when the topic of climate change is such a huge element of debate within today's current society. To do so, I researched the #TrashTag across various online platforms to find what people were saying and posting regarding the challenge and I took the data that I collected and analyzed why the #TrashTag was both important among the online users as well as what exactly the data showed.
Literature Review: What is the importance and impact of the social media phenomena #TrashTag challenge?
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.
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
As the subtitle says, pictures, especially in the instance of the viral power of the #TrashTag social media challenge, truly shows just how influential something simple as picking up trash can be. For instance, the picture inserted below was taken off of Mumbai Beach that had been covered with high-compacted trash for years. In the 'before' picture on the left, you can visibly see the trash piled high and littered across the beach. The impact of this trash build up with some piles over a staggering "5.5 feet tall" was so intense that it had affected the wildlife and had once been a popular hatching ground for turtles twenty years ago. However, after hundreds of volunteers took up the #TrashTag and collected "1,684,500 pounds of trash" the cleanup was described as the "largest beach clean up in history" and resulted in the sea turtles returning to the beach to lay their eggs. This is just one example of the true power that resulted from the #TrashTag and visually showed just how much of a difference it created.
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."Literary Review Works Cited
“A Whopping 91% of Plastic Isn't Recycled.” National Geographic, National Geographic Society, 20 Dec. 2018
CBS New York. “'Trash Tag' Challenge Going Viral.” YouTube, YouTube, 13 Mar. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqQ_Fj-RqNY.
“r/Wholesomememes - This Should Be the New Challenge to Make the World a Better Place!” Reddit
Method
Once I began to find data for my project, the method that I used to find said data was quite straightforward. The first step in finding my data was to take to various social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. First, I searched the platforms by looking up both the #TrashTag as well as #TrashChallenge as they are both used frequently and intermittently. Most times, both hastags were used at the same time since there wasn't really a set hashtag and people freely switched between the two. This part of the method section happened over the span of a week where I would take less than ten minutes a day going through the latest and most popular posts that were associated with the #TrashTag Challenge. There was no specific times when I looked up the latest #TrashTag trend and I did not have problems overcoming this because the amount of data that I was able to come across was more than enough for me to analyze and interpret. I simply looked up the hashtags and my data was there, ready for me to go over. I did not need to go over a week span of finding my data because I had more than enough posts that I could analyze without the amount becoming too overwhelming or repetitive. There were hundreds upon thousands of posts that were available to me but the posts that I focused on were the ones that had pictures associated alongside with the words because it was more impacting to see the actual power of the social media challenge as I could visibly see the difference in the before and after pictures of the sites cleaned up. I also choose to analyze tweets that seemed to generate more attention, which again revolved around pictures being associated with the posts but also surrounded celebrity figures including Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, and youtuber Zach King. Although there are thousands of posts, I decided to focus more on the restoration of public parks, beaches, and natural areas that have high levels of public visitation rather than being private owned land such as someone's back yard. I did this because I wanted to highlight the overall actions of the individuals choosing to participate in the #TrashTag Challenge to truly show how much of an impact was made for not only their surrounding environment, but for others as well.
Data Analysis and the Trends Associated With It
Once I began to break down and analyze the data I had gathered during my method section, I began to find trends and similarities in the posts that I was viewing.
For one, posts that had pictures pinned along with their message got a substantial amount of more attention, averaging a few thousand likes and retweets, which I can only assume is because of the power behind the pictures that showed just how much of a difference trash buildup makes in regards to the environment. Also, posts that had pictures were automatically retweeted and shared by various foundations and environmental pages that had a current update on successful #TrashTag projects. This only further increased the attention to the popular challenge responses and even got shared by bigger companies such as National Geographic and Discovery. With the pictures, it was easier for an audience to visualize the before and after process of various locations and showed the impact of the individual's efforts to clean their environment. Another thing that I found was that the posts surrounding the #TrashTag challenge that celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, and Zach King, all had used pictures to further spread the message, highlighting the true power behind attaching photos to show the stark effects of the challenge progress in some areas. Essentially the pictures were what made posts spreadable for an audience.
Two, a large majority of the posts being made on the various platforms came from a younger audience. According to the #TrashTag challenge analytics through Twitter, I was able to discover that the challenge was mostly being discussed amongst users in the 18-25 age range. Which was no shocker after going through dozens upon dozens of posts surrounding the challenge since I indeed found the social phenomena circulating around younger individuals. This connects to the recent uprise of climate awareness as it is now a huge topic of debate that has arisen from the newer, more younger generations. This could be because of two reasons, either: 1) youth are bringing the most awareness towards climate awareness or 2) younger individuals are more active with social media platforms. Of coarse there are the small handful of older adults that participated in the challenge as well, but the figures of participation are significantly lower than the youth population.
Three, another major trend that I came across is that most of the individuals participating within the #TrashTag usually tried to group up with more people so that they can take up a larger project. A prime example of this would be Mumbai Beach, but there were hundreds of posts that I came across that were oriented around a group project that would center on a number of people gathering to all tackle one location. These group projects also connected to adding to the spreadability of a post because the bigger the group, the more attention the post got because usually the post was shared by bigger eco-friendly pages and businesses that pushed for the #TrashTag challenge.
Lastly, and perhaps the most shockingly of all of my discoveries, was that even though the discussion surrounding the #TrashTag challenge was mostly positive sentiment, there was also a lot of backlash as well. Mostly the negative comments were individuals that didn't find the #TrashTag necessary and that it was more sad than anything that people needed a social media challenge in order to be motivated to pick up trash. These individuals that lingered more on the negative side pointed out that people should constantly be partaking in keeping their environment clean rather than do it for one day and upload a before and after pic with the sole intention of gaining attention from the social media challenge, wanting to seem eco-friendly just for the sake of likes and follows on their platform pages. There was a clear cut among people that posted in regards to the #TrashTag challenge: they either liked it and found it refreshing, or, they found it useless and a pathetic way for people to start paying attention to their environment.
Three, another major trend that I came across is that most of the individuals participating within the #TrashTag usually tried to group up with more people so that they can take up a larger project. A prime example of this would be Mumbai Beach, but there were hundreds of posts that I came across that were oriented around a group project that would center on a number of people gathering to all tackle one location. These group projects also connected to adding to the spreadability of a post because the bigger the group, the more attention the post got because usually the post was shared by bigger eco-friendly pages and businesses that pushed for the #TrashTag challenge.
Lastly, and perhaps the most shockingly of all of my discoveries, was that even though the discussion surrounding the #TrashTag challenge was mostly positive sentiment, there was also a lot of backlash as well. Mostly the negative comments were individuals that didn't find the #TrashTag necessary and that it was more sad than anything that people needed a social media challenge in order to be motivated to pick up trash. These individuals that lingered more on the negative side pointed out that people should constantly be partaking in keeping their environment clean rather than do it for one day and upload a before and after pic with the sole intention of gaining attention from the social media challenge, wanting to seem eco-friendly just for the sake of likes and follows on their platform pages. There was a clear cut among people that posted in regards to the #TrashTag challenge: they either liked it and found it refreshing, or, they found it useless and a pathetic way for people to start paying attention to their environment.
Conclusion
After everything that I have gathered for this project, it is easy to see that the phenomena of the #TrashTag challenge went viral. When you see the power of the pictures that show the impact of what trash truly does to an environment, it can send a spark of outcry that pushes the need to clean up onto individuals because our surroundings effect the planet we all live and thrive off of. A social media challenge such as the #TrashTag is too important to pass up because the concern for our soon future has been made vivid and popular among social media platforms, and essentially keeps people in constant contact with the impact trash has on our planet. That being said, however, a challenge like the one I have explored with this project is not only a call to action, it is also a drastic wake up call that showed some people only cared about a cleaner environment just because it was the latest trend on social media which is truly a problem all in its own. After analyzing the #TrashTag challenge, one can only ask whether the actions of these individuals is truly for the care of the planet or if it is just the usual behavior of following and participating within a popular online trend. Either way, awareness of a cleaner climate has been made and continues to bring attention to the rapidly changing climate that we are undergoing day by day so the affect is clearly there.
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