How Data Contribute to Cleaner Planet

TrashOut is a tool for mapping and monitoring illegal dumps all around the world. We are often asked, who do we contribute to a cleaner planet if we do not clean those dumps ourselves. The answer is we provide data to right people and organizations.

Imagine you are walking in the forest and you find a big pile of trash. You do not like it, obviously, but what can you do? Whom will you call? How will you describe the contents and size? And the worst part, how will you explain where exactly the trash is located? There is a need for a tool that provides this information to citizens, NGOs, and municipalities so they can organize cleanups efficiently.

Someone reports illegal dump through TrashOut mobile application. Takes a picture, chooses the size of the dump very easily with icons, chooses contents and application will add GPS coordinates automatically. This dump is now reported, meaning it is in TrashOut system.

Citizens, environmental organizations, and municipalities can subscribe to regular email notifications about a specific area they choose to monitor. You can choose the part of the city, or the whole country to watch over! Once per day, week or month these proactive individuals and organizations receive an email with all newly reported dumps, updated dumps and cleaned dumps in the area of their interests. Now they know and can act on this information. More people and organizations know about this issue, faster it will be dealt with.

Some municipality or active organization decides to organize the cleanup. Now they know how many people, trucks, bags they need and where to go. Directly from the application, they can organize a cleaning event, identify which landfills will be cleaned, fill in data on what they already have and what the participants should bring. If such an event exists, users will see it directly in the mobile app from where they can join the event and help to clean up their neighborhood

Once the dump is cleanup up, its status can be updated to cleaned. Hura!

People and organizations with regular notifications will be updated about the new status of this dump. If you reported or updated this dump, you will also see this new activity in your mobile application in section recent activities and receive push notification with the information that status of your report changed.

This way we can track problematic areas, we have data about contents and about the current status. These data and visualization then help local municipalities to prove that they do their job properly, to environmental NGOs to raise more financial and other support for their activities and to media to showcase local activities.

Do you know how many dumps are in your neighborhood? Do you know how you can contribute to cleaning up your surroundings? Check statistics in TrashOut app, map of dumps or organize cleaning action.