The social media have brought a brand new viral challenge and everyone is supporting and very fond of it. Even more, everyone considers this challenge to bring benefits and environment improvement.
On the largest social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, the users have been posting bunch of full litter bins and it has been marked as the #Trashtag Challenge.
The challenge is aimed mainly at “bored teens”, but also people of different ages started to follow it. This challenge requires from people to go outside, find an area covered in garbage, clean the area thoroughly and in this way, they give their bit of help in cleaning the environment and the planet. After successful completion of the challenge, people from all over the world share the photos of before and after the change, marking the area that was cleaned up.
This hashtag was initially started in 2015 by the outdoor company “UCO Gear” as integral part of their campaign for protection of the wilderness and the environment in general.
Recently, this campaign got restarted by the Facebook user named Byron Roman, posting a “before” picture of himself sitting in the middle of a thick layer of plastic litter that was followed by an “after” picture showing the clean-up effort, collecting nine large bags of garbage.
Byron even challenged the teenage users seeking from them to choose a place that needs some maintenance or cleaning, to take a photo prior to the cleaning and then a photo after the cleaning, to post it and to feel proud of themselves that they did something good for the planet.
Surprisingly, thousands teenagers replied to the challenge that motivated them to go to the nearest filed, forest, the beach or by the road in different parts of the world, individually or to join forces, and to clean the litter in a more efficient manner than ever. And they did in the thousands.
Despite the fact that the environmentalists were suspicious and considered this to be just one more action to have 5 minutes fame on the social media and to have a lot of “likes”, this challenge has developed to change, meaning the social media users did their best to have the perfect photo of the cleaned area and to use it to show off to their followers.
The first social media challenge that actually did some goodness in the world happened in 2014. Then, the Ice Bucket Challenge raised a huge amount of money for ALS, a disease familiar as motor neurone disease, providing even the direct funding of research and also raised the awareness for this disease.
This challenge also had some drawbacks. For instance, each participant did not have any detailed information related to this disease, where a support can be obtained or how to make a donation.
Still, these viral challenges represent good causes. The Trashtag Challenge raised people’s awareness about the environment on a higher level in a time when the governments are changing the environment policies, the big corporations tend to be more and more environmentally friendly and the countries and people from all over the world unite for a better future. In the end, the world should be inherited by the young, so as a social media generation this is their manner to show and prove how they can influence, change the perspective and make the world a better and cleaner place.
