Polk Street, 2018 to 2021

Where the litter was

Polk Street turns from homes to shops and bars as it runs south toward Broadway. The south block had the most litter, and the north block the least, for three years. The worst 18 m, just above Broadway, held 9% of everything picked up on the four blocks.

2.8x

the pieces on Broadway to Vallejo, against Union to Filbert.

49%

cigarette butts: 70,774 of them.

13,245

pieces in the first 18 m of the block above Broadway, outside two bars: the worst spot, 51% butts.

148

days with a cleanup, June 2018 to April 2021.

Pieces by block, south to north, against the quietest

Broadway to Vallejo

53,8512.8x

Vallejo to Green

40,7022.1x

Green to Union

29,6911.6x

Union to Filbert

19,1341.0x

Pieces by type

Cigarette butts

70,77449%

Paper

41,07729%

Bottles, cans and glass

7,5375%

Plastic, food and other

23,99017%

Plastic became its own category in January 2019; before that it was filed under other, so the two are counted together here.

What the posts said, checked

Each post and news story against the open data. The 2018 and 2019 counts that cover everything the team picked up use the whole file, nearby streets included; rows that name the four blocks use only them.

Post	What it said	The data
First month on Polk Street, September 2018	15,843 pieces in the pilot's first month, 59% tobacco.	15,671 pieces from August 11 to September 10, 2018, 60% cigarette butts.
r/dataisbeautiful, October 2018	Around 20,000 data points for the four blocks.	30,313 photos on the four blocks by October 4, 2018, counting from June 12.
A Polk Street Love Story, March 2019	20,000 data points for four blocks in the first month.	10,282 photos and 15,671 pieces from August 11 to September 10, 2018.
ABC7 News, March 2019	8,000 cigarette butts over two months.	7,609 cigarette butts on the four blocks from January 12 to March 12, 2019.
130,000 Reasons, August 2019	Over 130,000 pieces in almost a year.	127,081 pieces by August 22, 2019.
130,000 Reasons, August 2019	45% tobacco, 32% paper, 14% plastic, 7% other, 1% food, 1% glass.	On the four blocks to that date: 50% cigarette butts, 29% paper, 4% plastic (from January 2019 only), 5% bottles and cans, 9% other, 1% food, 1% glass.
130,000 Reasons, August 2019	The south end is the dirtiest: from 16 pieces a day on the cleanest block to 90 on the dirtiest.	Same order, higher counts: 38 a day on Union to Filbert and 105 on Broadway to Vallejo, June 12, 2018 to August 22, 2019 (437 days). Over three years Broadway to Vallejo has 2.8x the pieces.
130,000 Reasons, August 2019	Halloween was the most littered day of the year.	Sunday, October 28, 2018: 2,084 pieces, the most of any day from August 2018 to August 2019.
130,000 Reasons, August 2019	Peak litter in late 2018: about 1,000 pieces on a typical day in November 2018, about 400 by February 2019.	Per cleanup the count held: 1,005 in November 2018, 1,061 in February 2019. There were fewer cleanups, so per calendar day it fell from 302 to 227.
A Polk Street Love Story, March 2019	The data pinpointed the hotspot, right in front of two bars.	The busiest stretch is 14 to 32 m north of Broadway's center line: 13,245 pieces over three years, 51% cigarette butts.
A Polk Street Love Story, March 2019	A cigarette disposal station outside two bars cut cigarette butts on the block by 46% over six weeks.	Not measured again here: the data does not record when the station went in.

Watch three years on Polk Street

The story first, then the street, turned to run across the screen: Filbert on the left, Broadway on the right. Days fly by; four times the camera slows to walk ten minutes with one picker: the first cleanup in June 2018, the midnight after Halloween Sunday, a spring evening in 2019 and a pandemic-year afternoon. Each dot lights up when a piece is picked up there and turns grey over the next few days.

The live screen

In the corner, the grabber's own photo of the piece being picked up. It flies in from the spot on the map, lands with a flash, and the frame closes on the claw; the photos before it step down into a strip, and each one carries its number in the count. When the newest photo is from an earlier day, the screen says LATEST instead of LIVE.

The walk

When the three years are done, the street stands up in 3D and the camera walks it at head height from Filbert to Broadway, past a bar for every 3 m of street, as tall as everything picked up there. The tallest, on Broadway to Vallejo, is 2,415 pieces. Each block's sign stands on the curb as you reach it, and its row lights up in the panel.

Press play for June 2018 to April 2021 and the walk, 164 seconds. It ends with photos from the grabber.

Open the map full screen The walk, made of pieces The walk, round columns

Month by month

Pieces recorded each month. The peak was October 2018, with 16,362. Cleanups thinned out in 2019 and almost stopped in the pandemic.

J

A

S

O

N

D

19

F

M

A

M

J

A

S

O

N

D

20

M

A

J

A

S

A

A month's total depends on how many days the team went out as well as on how much litter there was. Hover a bar for the days.

Who picked up

Four pickers did nearly all of itWalks traced from each picker's photos, smoothed

Picker A4 miles walked · 4,533 pieces

Picker B41 miles walked · 47,576 pieces

Picker C48 miles walked · 56,526 pieces

Picker D22 miles walked · 27,245 pieces

16 others7,508 pieces

The grabber

Every piece was photographed in the grabber (the team called them rubbish beams) and filed by type before it went in the bag. That is why the photos below all look alike: an orange claw and one piece of litter. Routes were not recorded then, so the walks in the replay are traced from the photos in order.

Counted, not mapped

10 pieces of human waste.

They count in the totals, but they are left off the map. 123 records of street conditions (stains, graffiti, stickers) are not pieces picked up, so they are not counted here; they are in the open data.

From the grabber

A few of the 130,829 photos, each checked at full size. Photos with people, faces, wheels, signs or writing are not shown.

Plastic in the grabber, Polk Street — Plastic

Cigarette butt in the grabber, Polk Street — Cigarette butt

Litter in the grabber, Polk Street — Litter

Bottle or can in the grabber, Polk Street — Bottle or can

About these numbers

The four blocks are Polk Street from Broadway to Filbert, 2018 to 2021: 130,829 photos, 143,388 pieces (a photo can hold more than one piece). The open-data file also has pickups on nearby streets; the replay and the charts above use only these blocks. Pieces in the Broadway and Filbert crossings, and the few just past them, count with the nearest block.
Pieces are litter: cigarette butts, paper, bottles, cans, glass, plastic, food and other. Records of human waste are counted but not mapped.
Blocks are split where the cross streets meet Polk. Phone locations are good to about 10 m, about the width of the street, so the two sides of the street are not told apart here.
The records are open data: RubbishOpenData, polk-street-2018-2021.csv (CC BY 4.0). No names, accounts or photos; locations to about 11 m.
On the walk, each bar gathers the pieces recorded within a 3 m stretch of the street, both sides together, stacked by type; 1 m of height is about 172 pieces, so the busiest stretch stands 14 m tall. Phone locations are not precise enough to place a piece on one side of the street.
The worst spot is measured along the street's center line, from where Broadway crosses it: 14 to 32 m north of that line.
The photos on this page and the 80 on the replay's live screen were checked one by one at full size (no people, shoes, shadows, wheels, tarps, signs or writing; soft photos left out), cropped square, and carry no metadata.

On four blocks of Polk Street, we recorded 143,388 pieces of litter. Half were cigarette butts.