Talking Trash: A Reddit AMA with Rubbish

A image that symbolizes the Reddit x rubbish event, "Ask Me Anything"

On Earth Day, the Rubbish team did a live AMA on Reddit. Full disclosure: I don’t Reddit, and was curious and unsure about what types of questions we would receive during an “Ask Me Anything”. Emin, Felipe, Adam, and I (the team!) were excited to share our experience and talk trash.

At 8 am, we formed a virtual war-room via FaceTime and for the rest of the day, rapid-fire answered questions about why we care so much about litter. There was a lot of talk about data, poop, and how we are committed to growing our company Rubbish with the challenges of being in one of the most expensive cities in the United States.

There were questions about litter origins:

Someone asks "where does all the litter come from?" Felipe's answer: "it comes from everyone consuming things - and that's a part of our lives" — Our take on litter origins.

And questions about how San Francisco improving the conditions of the streets:

Someone asks "what is the #1 thing the SF government could do to reduce litter the most". Elena: "educate residents on best practices and keep them in the loop on developments. Data-driven solutions will help." Felipe: "making littering less easy and having the infrastructure in place such as cigarette receptacles in the right places, based on data not feelings" — There’s a bunch of things cities can do to reduce litter — these are just some.

We were asked several times our most memorable moment from picking up litter, which brought out some other folks who’ve been helped by a stranger:

Someone asks: "what's the most memorable thing you found while picking up litter?" Emin: "backpack containing empty wallets and passports of a German couple on their honeymoon. We got them back their stuff that night!" — True story.

There were many questions about trash can placement, common litter, and cigarettes — including a few talking about cigarette facts:

People start a conversation about how cigarettes are bad for people and the environment — Never too much cigarette butt talk.

In fact, Rubbish worked with Hey Social Good (thanks Cindy!) to evaluate the potential impact of cigarettes. We learned that one cigarette can contaminate 1,000 liters of water. With that assumption, the 35,574 cigarette butts picked up using the Rubbish Platform in 2019 successfully prevented the contamination of 35,574,000 liters of water (or 150,362,505 - 8oz Red Bull cans, or 9,397,656 gallons of milk). Holy smokes.