Our year in numbers

There were 11,000 reports of illegal dumpsites recorded via our applications in 80 countries. This means all together 62,000 illegal dumpsites were reported since we started this journey. The strongest countries were Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. Throughout the year 20,000 users used our mobile apps and 17,000 used our website and web app. We also experienced some great media coverage from Forbes and Slovak Spectator. 

Key updates of our applications

1/ We added new languages

We know that local issues require a bit of local approach and that is why we added a couple of new languages - Romanian, Hungarian, Portuguese and Italian. TrashOut is now available in 11 languages. We are ready to support countries and partners that have long-term plans with mapping and add your language as well. 



2/ Edit your location manually during reporting 

We are aware that your GPS accuracy is not always perfect. Especially when you go to nature, or when you are in more rural areas. That is why we implemented the possibility to edit location manually similarly to when you are ordering an Uber (available on web and android, iOS coming soon). 



3/ Adding comments

From the last year, all users and organizations can leave a comment on the specific report. This way they can let other users know what is the upcoming process with the reported dumpsite or if there was an issue with finding the dumpsite. Good thing is that all users that previously updated or commented on this report will be notified via email and push notification. This way, every time there is an update on the report you follow, you will be notified with fresh information.



4/ Reporting as an organization and a dedicated landing page

Many countries that use our application also have laws in place saying who should clean up the reported dumpsite. On the other hand, in many countries, it is NGOs who are doing the job. We understand that if we want those reports to be cleaned up we need to make the job of these organizations easier. That is why we implemented the possibility to report, update and comment as an organization. This allows organizations to appoint multiple users as managers that can act in their name. We also put together a landing page that explains why your organization should use TrashOut and how to make the most of it. 

5/ Stability

We worked on our stability issues and are happy to report that throughout 2020 we were available 99.962% of the time. Thanks to this you can rely on TrashOut being there when you stumble across the dump you want to report or you need to find the nearest recycling bin or centre.

Cooperations and partnerships

We are lucky to have amazing partners that share our journey and vision of a cleaner world. Thank you!

1/ Global partner: World Cleanup Day

This fantastic worldwide initiative uses TrashOut as the mapping tool. Together we organize mapping competitions among countries. We encourage them to both report new dumpsites, update old reports and of course clean them up. Especially with the pandemic, it was great to engage citizens in the activity that can be done solo or in a small group keeping safety precautions. In the end, a couple of countries stood out and were awarded a certificate during Clean Conference 2021. 

2/ Slovak partners: Zelená linka and Upracme Slovensko

We are glad to say we have strong partners in our home country. Zelená linka (translation: Green line) is an initiative of the Ministry of Environment of Slovak Republic. It is a team that takes care of all the reports about environmental issues from citizens. It finds the responsible local municipality or office and oversees that those reports are delivered and solved. 

Since summer 2020 they have been sending reports made by Slovak users via TrashOut to the right authority which resulted in the big growth of reports marked as cleaned. They regularly comment on the reports they started to deal with which show TrashOut users that their activity is noticed and will have a result. 

We also partner with Upracme Slovensko, NGO that organizes national cleanups twice a year. Together we organize challenges to engage Slovak citizens in both mapping and cleaning. Top users are rewarded with local eco-friendly products. 

4/ Romanian partner: Let's do it Romania with their ticketing platform 4B

Let's do it Romania, an organization doing cleanups for years in Romania started to heavily promote the solution that combines TrashOut and their ticketing platform called 4B. This solution allows them to automatically send reports made via TrashOut to local authorities. The official petition in .pdf is generated and send to the authorities with the ask to act. Their volunteers then update the information back to TrashOut so users are notified about the new status of their report. In 5 months they managed to send 1,700 notifications to local authorities and 225 of those were successfully cleaned, which means 2,300 tons of waste were collected. 

5/ Hungarian partner: Plastic Cup with a project to clean Tisza river

Plastic Cup is a Hungarian organization that leads Erasmus project 5 COUNTRIES 1 RIVER (5in1) project implements cooperation between the countries sharing the Tisza River Basin - Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia. The project develops effective education and training activities focused on mobilizing young schoolchildren (aged 6-18). Slovakia is represented by TrashOut and our app will be used to map contaminated areas around the Tisza river. This is a long term project lasting till August 2023.

6/ Global partner: Omdena with a project applying machine learning to predict illegal dumpsites

Omdena is a platform that is enabling impact organizations with agile and ethical AI development. During the 2 months long project its volunteers helped tackle the issue of building machine learning models on illegal dumping to see if there are any patterns that can help understand what causes illegal dumping, predict potential dumpsites, and eventually help to avoid them. TrashOut's data were enriched by data from other sources like Foursquare or World Bank indicator. This challenge finished with a demo day where participants presented a couple of concepts. You can read more about the process and its results on Omdena's website. 

We want to thank also all the partners that supported us financially - World Cleanup Day, Plastic Cup and Let's do it Romania. Thank you, all individuals and companies that donated in 2020. We are glad that companies like AWS, Canva, Google and others allow NGOs to use their services with big discounts or for free which helps us to fulfill our vision. 

Plans for 2021

During this year we plan to implement a couple of features that our partners requested. The biggest one will be offline reporting which we believe will increase adoption mainly in developing countries. We are ready to onboard and support more partners and welcome more users who want to contribute to systemic change. If you are interested in cooperation please get in touch at [email protected]. In case you want to support our project head to this page. Let's clean our planet together!