upworthy

trash

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Did you know that littering is bad? Of course you did! We all do. But people still do it every day on an incalculable scale, and it might have something to do with the fact that we rarely stop to think about whylittering is actually so bad for the Earth. Sure, it looks gross, but does it actually hurt anything?

The answer is, of course, Yes. Chemicals and microplastics in pieces of trash don't just stay there, they inevitably make their way into our soil, into our waterways, and even into our food. It can also spread disease and kill wildlife.

Look, I get it. Pollution is an overwhelming idea. When you see giant piles of garbage covering the streets, and you think how big the world is, it feels like there's no way to make a difference. Is picking up one piece of trash going to matter? How about ten? A hundred? A million?

This is the exact question behind one 30-year-old woman's quest to make a difference. Emily started a campaign called Million Little Pieces, and is documenting her journey on TikTok as she works to pick up one million individual pieces of litter. It sounds like a lofty and impossible goal, but as of this writing, she's already well over 200,000 and counting.

In January of 2024, Emily was in a car crash that left her with a spine injury. She wanted to get in better shape after and began walking as part of her rehab, but as she walked, she noticed just a ton of garbage everywhere she went. She was disheartened to say the least. That's where Emily came up with the idea to pick up all the litter she could find along the way, ultimately settling on a goal of one million pieces.

In one recent video, she hits 217,286 after 233 straight days of picking up trash. The dedication is absolutely amazing to watch!


@millionlittlepieces

12/21/24 Day 233 of collecting one million pieces of #litter. Daily total: 753 Grand total: 217,668 Follow me please 💕🧍‍♀️ Go check out StopLittering.com and use my code 0efg9b4Z 🫶🏻🌎 #earthdayeveryday #cleantheworld #fightpollution #bethechangeyouwishtosee #millionlittlepieces #millionactsoflove #millionchallenge #cleaningchallenge #litter #trash #rubbish #waste #globalmovement #bekindtotheworld #onepieceatatime #landfills #recycle #dobetter #mothernature #theworldisdying #christmas #newyear #thankyou



Sadly, litter is easy to find for Emily and the Million Little Pieces project. She finds anywhere from 500 to 2000 or more pieces a day just on walks through local parks and neighborhoods.

The worst offenders are aluminum cans and, not surprisingly, cigarette butts — which just so happen to be one of the most destructive forms of littering around

Not everything she finds is trash, however! Outside of obviously recyclable items, she finds lots of things that can be washed or otherwise cleaned up and donated, like old clothing and sports equipment. She finds tons of tennis balls and hands them over to a local dog shelter.

And, of course, there's the money! (Though it takes a while to add up. By day 100 she'd found a total of around five dollars.)

@millionlittlepieces

Replying to @swagballs69 I literally found a quarter right after filming this video 💰 100 days of picking up trash, 102,709 pieces collected, $5.49 found! #cleantheplanet #quitlitterin #stoplittering #cleaning #recycle #earthdayeveryday #nature #parks #florida #trash #garbage #environment #litteringistrashy #fypage #fyp #cleantok #treasure

One of the best things to come out of the Million Little Pieces project, besides a cleaner planet, is the way it's inspiring others.

Commenters mention constantly how much they admire the work Emily is doing, and so many of them have begun picking up trash in their own neighborhoods. She even encourages people to send in their own counts for a little competition! Emily also offers tips for how to get started for people who are interested in following her lead.

"I love this! I just bought a grabber," wrote one commenter on an early video.

Viewers who can't help themselves will cheer Emily on, donate to her cause, or buy her new litter-picking gear from her Amazon wishlist.

They say one of the main reasons people litter is because there's already litter present in the area. What can it hurt to toss a cup or a cigarette butt onto an already substantial pile of trash?

That's not the kind of thinking we need. If you've ever heard of the Shopping Cart Theory, it states that whether you return your shopping cart to the proper area is a good judge of your integrity. It takes effort to do and you gain nothing personally by doing it, and there are also no consequences for not doing it. So the question is, do you care about the next person that comes along, do you care about the community? Emily likens littering to the shopping cart conundrum. You don't have to spend an entire year picking up hundreds of thousands of pieces of trash, all you really have to do to make a difference is walk the extra couple of steps to find a trash can, recycling bin, or ash tray. After watching Emily's videos, you'll definitely be inspired to put in the extra effort!

Henderson Island should be the remote island paradise of your dreams. Instead, it looks like this:

It wasn't the locals (the island is uninhabited) or any bullheaded tourists who left the rubbish there. Henderson Island sits the middle of the South Pacific, more than 3,000 miles away from Australia, New Zealand, and South America.

It's so far removed that when researcher Jennifer Lavers went there in 2015, it took two planes and convincing a passing freight ship to make a detour, The Atlantic reported.


It's not exactly a spring break trip to Cabo.

And yet the island is home to millions of pieces of trash. An estimated 37.7 million, to be specific. Most of it is plastic, a vast collection of little green army men, red Monopoly motels, cigarette lighters, and discarded toothbrushes.

So who the hell put all that plastic there?

The answer is all of us. We all did.

Photo from Jennifer Lavers/AP Photos.

Henderson Island sits near the middle of the South Pacific ocean gyre, which is a gigantic circle of ocean currents that pick up trash from all across the ocean. Henderson's just an unfortunate obstacle in the way.

“What’s happened on Henderson Island shows there’s no escaping plastic pollution even in the most distant parts of our oceans," Lavers said in a press release.

"Henderson Island is a shocking but typical example of how plastic debris is affecting the environment on a global scale," Lavers said. She and a team of six other people stayed on Henderson for three and a half months to document the pollution. They published their findings this month in a new scientific paper.

This is one island, but it shows how bad the problem is. A 2015 study estimated we could be dumping more than 10 billion pounds of plastic into the ocean each year. Plastic pollution can harm or even kill sea life and can affect human health.

If we don't change something, every beach in the world could eventually look like Henderson Island.

Photo from Jennifer Lavers/University of Tasmania.

We shouldn't lose hope. Whether it's gigantic plastic-collecting pontoons, solar-powered trash-gobblers, beach cleanups, or getting fishermen to nab old, floating nets out of the water, there are ways we can still try to fix this.

Of course, maybe the place to start is to be smarter about how we use plastic in the first place (Lavers herself was so appalled that she's switched to a bamboo iPhone case and toothbrush, the AP reported).

But we need to be aware of what's at stake. Because if this can happen to a deserted island, it can happen at home too.

We learn a lot by paying attention to the little things — in this case, the very little, bug-sized things.

That's what biologist and amateur beekeeper Federica Bertocchini noticed while tending to her beehives in Madrid.

To keep her bees healthy and happy, Bertocchini has to remove pests that move into the hives, including a tiny beeswax-munching caterpillar known as the wax worm.


A comb full of beeswax is a tasty meal for wax worms. Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images.

One day, Bertocchini was clearing out the worms, placing them in a plastic grocery bag. After working for a while, she discovered the plastic bag had developed a bunch of little holes.

The worms were eating their way out!

Plastic-eating caterpillars? Yep, they're real.

What's a freak event to one person can be inspiration to a scientist. Bertocchini decided to put the little critters to the test.

She rounded up some colleagues and gave the caterpillars more polyethylene bags to munch on. Polyethylene makes up about 40% of Europe's plastic demand. Sure enough, the caterpillars started eating through those bags, digesting the plastic, and turning it into ethylene glycol, an odorless compound found in antifreeze.

Taking a step back, Bertocchini's team said this actually makes sense. The worms normally eat wax to survive, and wax and plastic aren't that different, chemically. But this discovery could have big consequences for the environment.

A new way to digest plastic could make a difference both on land and in the ocean.

Humans love their plastic — plastic bottles, milk jugs, sandwich baggies — but unfortunately, we don't pay that much attention to what happens after we use it. Scientists estimate 4 million to 12 million metric tons of plastic enters the oceans each year.

Trash in Manila Bay in 2014. Photo from Jay Directo/AFP/Getty Images

And while ethylene glycol — what the worms are pooping out — isn't exactly great for the environment either, the substance breaks down in weeks instead of the decades or centuries that a polyethylene bag might take.

Caterpillars, bacteria, and other critters have been seen eating or breaking down plastic bags before, though Bertocchini's team said the wax worms broke down plastic faster than any other recent discoveries.

This is a really cool example of scientists learning from nature.

Though the digestion happened pretty quickly compared to other methods, it still took 100 worms 12 hours to eat through a little more than 90 milligrams of plastic. It would take those worms about a month to break down one plastic bag.

Bertocchini and her team don't yet know what exactly it is inside the wax worms that's breaking down the plastic — it might be an enzyme or some kind of gut bacteria — but once they figure that out, they might be able to supercharge the process and harness it for good.

In a news release, Bertocchini's team said they want to find a way to use this discovery to clean up our rivers and oceans. Their paper was published in the scientific journal Current Biology.

Good news for fans of foggy, damp British beaches!

A beautiful day on the beach in Hastings, Sussex. Photo by Peter Trimming/geograph.org.uk.

Thanks to the efforts of local policymakers and environmental activists, it appears those beaches are a lot less plastic-baggy then they were just five years ago.


In 2011, Wales became the first country in the United Kingdom to require customers at supermarkets and retail stores who want a single-use plastic bag to pay a 5-pence surcharge.

Basically, anyone who wanted to take their items home in a plastic bag had to pay about 5 cents per bag.

An old Sainsbury's bag. Photo by Mark Tristan/Flickr.

Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England followed suit just a few years later. Fast-forward to 2016, and it turns out the new rules have actually been making a noticeable difference, at least in terms of how many of the unsightly, bird-intestine-cloggers wash up on shore, according to a BBC report:

"The number of plastic carrier bags found on UK beaches has dropped by almost half, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) has said.

The charity's Great British Beach Clean report found just under seven bags per 100 metres of coastline cleaned.

That is a 40% drop from the average 11 bags found in 2015 and is the lowest number in 10 years."



The study wasn't all good news — it also found an increase in plastic bottles and balloon-related litter, and plastic bag trash increased slightly in some regions of England — but overall, the trend seems to be heading in a positive direction.

This is good news for hey-maybe-using-so-much-plastic-just-one-time-is-not-so-good advocates in the United States, who have already won a few key victories in recent years.

A Ralph's supermarket in Hollywood, California. Photo by Yebo420/Wikimedia Commons.

Plastic trash has a nasty habit of poisoning birds, sneaking into the food chain, and winding up in places like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where it hangs out for hundreds of years, breaking down bit by bit without truly biodegrading. As a result, U.S. states and cities have fought back against our propensity to dispense them willy-nilly.

California banned single-use plastic bags at large retailers in 2014 (a ballot measure affirming the ban was approved this year). Though the prohibition measures are fairly new and the effects are difficult to study comprehensively, data on similar measures is largely encouraging.

Cities like Seattle; Austin, Texas; and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have approved similar bans, while New York City and Washington, D.C., have passed surcharge ordinances similar to those in the U.K.

While plastic bag taxes and bans can seem like a small thing, they can help limit fossil fuel use and promote the health and welfare of marine life, two steps that are crucial for creating a less litter-filled planet.

A bag on the beach at Red Wharf Bay in Wales. Photo by John S. Turner/geograph.org.uk.

A plastic bag surcharge may not be the Paris Agreement, but the fact that data is starting to show that incentivizing customers to reuse shopping bags can be effective environmental policy is good news.

What's better? It's the kind of effective environmental policy supported by data you can see right in front of your face every time you lay out on the beach for a tan.

In the grand scheme of saving the planet, less cluttered beaches are a little thing.

But if it's going to take a sea change to save our planet, it can't hurt to start by cleaning the beach.