For the past couple of weeks, youngsters in Aurangabad have been walking around the city looking for piles of garbage. After finding one, they clean it up and post ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures on social media.
This is the new viral trend – the #Trashtag Challenge.
The group decided to clean up their city’s most popular tourist spot, Gogababa Tekdi. The youngsters, with their weekly cleanliness drive, aspire to make Aurangabad one of the cleanest cities in the country.
There are million others around the world who are taking up the #Trashtag challenge. They find littered spots, clean them and then post ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures on social media.
#trashtagchallenge #trashtag 700 ton plastic cleaned up from Mahim beach. The dog is thinking, "There was a beach under there?" pic.twitter.com/cJevdCxnfd
— Pratika RCC Pipes Hyderabad (@rcc_pipes) March 13, 2019
#TrashTag #TrashtagChallenge is the best of the best. Internet deserves it! pic.twitter.com/R6Z63lr3S1
— Sergey Yudovskiy (@Yud_SS) March 17, 2019
Manadhoo Beach Cleaning#TrashtagChallenge #Maldives#Manadhoo#NoonuAtoll pic.twitter.com/209l8KmHog
— Manadhoo Zuvanunge Gulhun (@mzgmanadhoo) March 16, 2019
The challenge, however, is not all that new.
It first appeared on social media in 2015 when an outdoor gear company UCO launched project Trashtag as a promotional campaign to encourage people to pick up trash while they were out trekking or hiking.
That year, a Mumbai-based lawyer, Afroz Shah, used the hashtag to encourage people to clean Versova beach, for which The UN gave him the Champion of the Earth award.
Four years later, the challenge went viral on social media when Bryon Roman posted on Facebook saying, “Here is a new #challenge for you bored teens. Take a photo of an area that needs cleaning or maintenance, then take a photo after you have done something about, and post it.”
Soon after, people from across all age groups started posting pictures of places they cleaned. They also nominated others to do the same. So far, thousands of people from around the world have taken part in the challenge and the numbers are still growing.
Featured image credit: Twitter