One Man Alone Made the Whole World to Come Outside and Remove Trash From Their Streets

It turns out that hashtags are useful for more than just finding new photos of cats on Instagram. Sometimes, they can help us to change the world for the better. Once, a simple guy decided to remove a pile of trash under a big tree, took “before” and “after” photos, uploaded them onto the Internet and suggested for others to follow his example. Thousands of other people accepted this challenge. That’s how #trashtag came to be.

At Bright Side, we’re inspired by the people who left their important things behind and decided to fight trash piles on the streets. And their actions deserve our respect and admiration.

1. Photos of how it all started

2. A man from Mumbai removed 11 million pounds of trash from the beach within 96 weeks.

3. “We pulled a bunch of plastic bottles from the bottom of the cliff at Delicate Arch!”

4. “We cleaned up this beach in Florida!”

5. “This is just an hour’s worth of work!”

6. “We made a trash snowman at a beach cleanup in Taiwan!”

7. “I’ve picked over 8,000 cigarettes off the street to be recycled.”

8. “My fiancé and his annual beach cleanup. He picks up garbage every year at Buffalo NY Lake Erie. The first year he ended up with 75 contractor bags full. Every year since, it’s been becoming decidedly smaller. Last year it was around 50.”

9. “Picking up after the neighborhood on our bike ride”

10. “We collected all this from our small beach at Kites Cove.”

11. These photos are from Nepal. But even here, there are people who want to make a difference.

12. Some trash clean-up in India. The street looks completely different now.

13. “Definitely not as impressive as some of the other clean-ups, but I picked up trash around my old high school last weekend.”

14. “I cleaned up floating debris in Jamaica Bay, NY.”

15. " We cleaned up a creek in Asheville, NC and collected 44 bags of trash."

16. “There’s an organization I volunteer at and we basically do clean-ups like this in the city. They find places that have been forgotten by the local government and make them accessible to the public.”

17. “I work at an elementary school in Japan. This morning we spent an hour walking around the neighborhood picking up trash. We weren’t aware of #trashtag, it was just something to be done.”

18. “Me and a crew of 500 people picking up trash at South Mountain Regional Park! Around 8,000 lb of trash removed in 2 hours!”

19. “Diesel and I made a contribution today at our local trail in Indiana!”

20. “My aunt’s boyfriend runs the Clean Harbours Initiative in Newfoundland and hauls trash out of the water all day long.”

21. “The kids and I spent some quality time together cleaning this up!”

22. “I know it’s not much but here is the pile of trash I picked up during class the other week. It was all just down the side of a country road.”

23. “We cleaned up a beach on an island off the east coast of Johor, Malaysia.”

24. “We did our part today for #trashtag while offroading in the mountains of California.”

25. Manila Bay has been considered one of the dirtiest bays across the world. After 11 years, the Supreme Court finally issued a clean-up order which thousands of volunteers joined on January 27, 2019.

26. “As a Parks and Rec employee, thank you to anyone who has ever helped clean up a park. This river used to be covered in trash and it’s pristine again because of all of you. I hope #TrashTag never ends.”

Do you have places in your home area that need a major clean-up? Would you join the #trashtag movement yourself?