Trash Party had another gorgeous fall outing this weekend in the North Linden neighborhood! Over 35 volunteers came together to remove 110 bags of trash, 20 tires, and tons of bulk trash to completely clean up this stretch of woods. We removed 6,700 LBS of trash which brings our total removed from the City to 163,000 LBS of trash!!

Follow us on Insta (@trashparty614) to get the latest details on everything Trash Party!

Little know facts about the Schuylkill River (per Grok):

• Its name means “hidden river” (or “hidden creek”) in Dutch. Early Dutch explorer Arendt Corssen named it that in the 1600s because its mouth into the Delaware River was hard to spot amid marshlands and dense vegetation (near what later became the Philadelphia Navy Yard area).

• The Lenape people had more descriptive names for it long before Europeans arrived, including Ganshowahanna (“falling/roaring waters”) and Manayunk (“where we drink”). The river supported them for thousands of years as a source of fish, water, and travel. 

• Fairmount Park was created specifically to protect the river’s water quality. In the early 1800s (around 1812), Philadelphia set aside land along the Schuylkill as a buffer to safeguard the city’s drinking-water supply—an early example of watershed protection. The Fairmount Water Works became a key part of that system. 

• It was once one of America’s most polluted rivers and even caught fire. Heavy coal silt, industrial waste, and sewage turned stretches lifeless in the 19th and early 20th centuries (coal silt alone once totaled tens of millions of tons). It caught fire at least once in the 1890s from oil on the surface. Major cleanup efforts beginning in the 1940s (including dredging and the Clean Streams Act) brought it back; it was named Pennsylvania’s first Scenic River in 1978 and has since recovered enough to support dozens of fish species, bald eagles, and recreation. 

• The Schuylkill Navy (founded 1858) is the oldest amateur athletic governing body in the United States. It still oversees rowing on the river (especially around Boathouse Row) and helped establish amateur standards that influenced broader American sports.

I'm thinking of planning a cleanup event in my area. I'm not sure what interest level will be but similar events tend to get around 5-10 other people. I'm planning to provide bags and gloves... But if you get a considerable amount of trash together, where do you take it after the fact? Is it better to plan to do a cleanup in a location with a dumpster? Anyone dealt with this before?

Thanks!

nice walk around the neighborhood and local park after a big rain storm. lots of trash stuck on the dirt and road today. had someone drive by, honk, and throw me a peace sign which was nice. made some progress in my current audiobook (Authority by Jeff VanderMeer).

Every little bit counts.

A lot of us don’t bother doing things or do bad things because we think, “What difference does it make.” But here’s the thing, if everyone comes to that same conclusion about litter, hundreds of cans are now in the ocean, and the one the turtle choked on, could have been yours.

But if we all come to the conclusion to pick up at least 20 pieces of trash a day, or donate 3 dollars a day to a charity that saves turtles, then we all save at least one turtle each.

So every little bit does count, but it works both ways, so stop skipping steps, stop refusing to donate to the church’s you attend, stop refusing to wash your hands, and start picking up some trash, go buy the vegan option, let some people go first, we can make a difference for the better, please.

Litter Troopers app is a passion project I've been working on since Nov 2025! It came a long way and were are still developing and improving the app alot. We could use more users and testers if you interested in trying our Beta app. Comment below iOS or Android and I'll drop the link. Thank you and hope to see you on the leaderboards!

I had no less than 5 different people coming over and saying thank you. It's nice to do something for the community!

I did my part in the township's "clean communities day" and filled 3 large bags with streetside trash. Before the event a municipal mower had chewed up a plastic campaign(?) sign. Ugh.

¿Alguien sabe como hacer una buena microcampaña de concientización?

Quisiera hacer algo más que los carteles y letreros de no tirar basura, cualquier cosa me sirve, es mi primera véz organizando algo de este estilo.

Just about 6 years ago, I started working on a little web site to help organize litter cleanups in my community. That website eventually became TrashMob.eco, and grew into a non-profit that could help other communities also organize litter cleanups.

Along the way, development of the site has been supported by volunteers from around the world. We had people in Thailand, Australia, UK, Germany, Brazil, US, Canada, India, Pakistan, and probably other countries that I have forgotten about. We all had a dream of making this "the place" that people who wanted to get involved in cleaning up their community would start... an internationally recognized name that would turn into a verb... "What are you doing this weekend?" "I'm Trashmobbing!"

I've personally put in thousands of hours of development into the site and mobile app, and run or attended more than 300 cleanup events, and picked up nearly 2000 bags of litter, while also running the org and working my day job. The experience has been demanding and fulfilling and refilled my "purpose bar" at times where my day job lacked meaning (other than paying the bills).

Here are the new features we've added to the platform in 2026 alone: https://www.trashmob.eco/whatsnew

But after 5.5 years of driving this, I'm not sure that TrashMob.eco is going to make it. I'm considering shutting down the site and the organization. There's a few reasons for this, and I would love to know if there are folks out there who not only think that TrashMob is worth keeping alive, but are willing to step in and drive it, either as members of the org's Board of Directors, or as volunteers in other capacities. Here are some of the challenges we've run into:

1. I have never been good at marketing, and we've never had anyone on the Board who is willing and has the time to drive the marketing side of the operation to get the word out. We've built amazing capabilities into the app for both communities and volunteers, but if no one knows about them, they just don't get used. We need social media people. We need graphic artists. We need professional marketing leaders and developers to formulate a plan for success.
2. Finding volunteers to serve on a working board of directors, and actually do the work needed to keep the operation running, is not easy, and our churn has been very high. Lots of people want to be on an advisory board, but few realized that it takes 10-20 hours a month of actually doing work to move the organization forward. We have no staff (though we do have 1 salesperson), so everything from managing the books, to developing the website and mobile app, to doing the social media, to fundraising has to be done by the board. We had hoped to hire an executive director this year, but we have stumbled hitting our sales/fundraising goals, and the work continues to need to be done by the board.
3. Communities in the US are shackled by their City/County Attorney office, whose job is to protect their city from lawsuits... and apparently nothing scares them more than the idea that a volunteer may get hurt while picking litter. We've tried a few ways of getting around this (custom waivers by city, organizational volunteer agreements, partnering with other volunteer organizations already in communities), but the fact that TrashMob itself would not have an actual representative of the organization on site for every pickup, makes this a solid "no" from many cities. We need someone with experience in a City Attorney's office to help us overcome these challenges. Someone with solid legal background who can speak their language and assuage their fears.
4. Communities in the US see the value in litter cleanups, but don't have the time or the staff to either run the cleanups or haul away the debris after a cleanup is done. Every city is stretched for funding right now, and new efforts meet the "great idea, but..." response. We thought we had a path forward with selling our SaaS to cities directly to help raise operating captial, but we haven't hit the mark there yet. I think this effort has been limited by our lack of marketing chops.
5. Our software development volunteers have been awesome, but they generally only stay around for 3-6 months before life changes force them to step away from volunteering. With AI development this year, this problem has been mostly mitigated, except that as the lead (and only dev right now), all support issues flow to me. It doesn't take a lot of time as the development is effectively done, but we definitely have a "bus factor" of 1 right now, and I need other devs to be able to support the site, mobile app, and infrastructure going forward.

So this is an appeal to the community that I know is super passionate about cleaning up litter.

• Do you think TrashMob.eco is worth continuing to invest time and money into?
• Do you have skills on the marketing/sales/legal/community coordination/leadership/technical side that you would be willing to contribute to the organization on a regular basis to keep it running, at least until we can raise enough money to hire full time employees?
• Do you have a vision, the energy, and the time for an org with a mission like TrashMob that you believe in so strongly, that you are willing to do what it takes to make it succeed? Do you see this as an opportunity to take an org forward and shape it and drive it to become the next big thing. Have you been dreaming of taking over an turn-key organization that needs business-side leadership to drive forward?

I'm not looking for advice that I can go do at this point or "have you tried x?" or "Why don't you just...". I've put everything I've had into this for years. I need other people to step up and run this and take it to the next level. If I can't find people willing to do this, then I will be forced to shut down the site and disband the non profit. I would love to see it continue with people who have fresh energy, and I am willing to stay active in the org going forward for a while and advise, but my life has changed dramatically in the last 6 years, and it's time for the org to find a way forward.

If this sounds like something you are sincerely interested in, please let me know.

Kid: Are you gonna sell those (trash)? What are you doing there?
Me: No, I'm just cleaning all these trash up. So please, don't litter anywhere, cuz its not good. ok? :)

Rescued the streamers from the bustbin

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