Here’s are PowerPoint files of my talk at the July 26, 2018 Litter Index Community Training.
Here’s are PowerPoint files of my talk at the July 26, 2018 Litter Index Community Training.
Posted in Phila Trash
Tagged Illegal Dumping, Phila Zero Waste & Litter, Philadelphia litter
Logan Triangle, like many areas in Philadelphia, suffers from excessive illegal dumping.
At the Logan Civic Association meeting on May 14th, local residents complained about this long term problem and asked for action.
Based on District 8 Trash Task Force meetings, personal investigations and Philadelphia’s Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet information, I have assembled the attached Logan Triangle Illegal Dumping Action Plan to help focus our efforts to tackling the Logan Triangle and wider dumping crisis.
Key points from this draft plan:
Posted in Phila Trash
Tagged Council District 8, Illegal Dumping, Phila Zero Waste & Litter
Philadelphia has taken a major step forward with the recent release of the interactive 2017 Litter Index map (link) and supporting data (link).
In my January, 2017 post, I compared Philadelphia’s earlier litter index to the then recently released LA Street Litter Index. LA had made significant improvements in their index. I am thrilled to report that one year later, Philadelphia has a state-of-the-art litter index that provides litter status data for every street segment in the City.
The new index is based on city block surveys where surveyors assessed the litter situation on a 4 point scale:
Surveyor data included date(s) of survey, litter count for the block as well as a link to field photograph(s).
Users can download the City’s detailed litter survey data at 3 levels of detail:
The data is available in CSV files, shapefiles and GeoJSOn files. The best place to start is to look at the Metadata for the point, line and polygon data.
I have started analyzing the 2017 Litter Index Data for Council District 8. These 2 maps show the point survey data and the block – street segment data for Council District 8.
Congratulations to the City’s Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet for implementing this comprehensive litter measurement system. This data will help community groups, individuals, litter activists and City Departments to focus attention on both city-wide and neighborhood priorities and measure progress as we work together to solve the City’s chronic street trash problem.
Philadelphia has 6 Sanitation Convenience Centers (SCC) that provide residents safe, free, reliable disposal sites for excess trash and special items like tires and TVs,electronics.
These Centers are a critical resource for the City’s Zero Waste and Litter efforts, however, there are two residential access issues that must be addressed to ensure their potential effectiveness:
Residents access to an SCC is critical for reducing illegal dumping. The City will need to improve access to the SCCs for households without vehicles and those outside the 15-minute travel time zones
My most recent report on Philadelphia Street Trash includes this hot spot analysis of Philly311 Illegal Dumping Service Requests. You can download the report here.
Posted in Phila Trash, TTF Watershed
Tagged Illegal Dumping, Litter GIS, Phila Zero Waste & Litter
Illegal dumping is a growing problem in Philadelphia (link)! We need to understand types – locations – frequency of dumping to stop it. We have the data, we need better data analysis to effectively manage our trash problem.
Here are 3 charts that demonstrate how we can diagnose our trash dumping problem using January, 2017 311 illegal dumping service requests where citizens submitted photos.
Illegal Dumping Trash Types
Illegal Dumping Locations
Illegal Dumping Trash Events
Here’s what we can learn by studying the January, 2017 illegal dumping service requests.
Posted in Phila Trash
Tagged Illegal Dumping, Illegal Dumpsites, Phila Zero Waste & Litter
Philadelphia’s 311 OpenData is an excellent research tool to investigate our street trash problem. Philadelphia has used data to fight crime (link) for a long time, it’s now time to use Philadelphia’s 311 data to fight street trash!
We have many of the basic tools necessary for implementing a state-of-the-art street trash management system comparable to our crime data system. We need to increase the City’s focus on street trash and integrate our many resources into a concerted program to address this chronic problem.
In this post I want to show how the City’s 311 data system can be used to better understand our street trash problem and identify potential control strategies based on resident provided street trash data.
Analysis of January, 2017 311 Illegal Dumping Service Requests
There were 1,277 illegal dumping service requests in January, 2017 (link). My earlier posts showed that illegal dumping service requests are increasing and that illegal dumping requests are increasing as a portion of all 311 field service requests (link). What can we learn about the types and locations of trash being dumped?
We can use the photos submitted by 311 users to classify the requests by type of trash, dump site location and dump situation conditions. That’s just what I did.
I downloaded the 1,277 January, 2017 illegal dumping service requests from OpenDataPhilly, selected those requests that had usable photos (302 ) and then classified request by Trash Description, Dump Location Description, and Dump Site Characteristics. Here is a link to my on-line Google Sheet where you can view the classifications and check out the photos.
Click the Link field to view the resident’s submitted image. A new window will pop up showing the actual url with a small arrow . Click the arrow to navigate to the resident’s image.
I used a series of pivot tables to summaries of the Jan, 2017 illegal dumping requests. Here’s what I found out:
Posted in Phila Trash
Tagged Illegal Dumping, Illegal Dumpsites, Phila Zero Waste & Litter
Philadelphia has a street trash problem that is being mislabeled as a litter problem. We all understand litter, the soda bottle, snack food wrapper that is tossed on the sidewalk. Unfortunately we tend to use litter for all “street trash”, both gross illegal dumping and the extraneous snack food wrapper.
I have started using street trash to label all street-sidewalk-vacant lot-park space debris, including tires, TVs, mattresses, bulky items-furniture, residential trash as well as the pedestrian snack food droppings. All is trash, all has wound up in our common space, hence the term street trash.
Here are several Philadelphia 311 illegal dumping service request photos taken from the 311 OpenDataPhilly website (link) on Monday, February 6, 2017.
We will only have clean streets when we address and begin to control our illegal dumping crisis. Much of what we call litter actually start as bags of residential trash that are placed on a sidewalk by someone unwilling to wait until the next trash day.
Let’s start to call all dumpers by their right name, DUMPERS. An old mattress or soda bottle tossed on the sidewalk comes from the same thoughtless behavior. We need to go after all dumpers, big and small.
Philadelphia’s Zero Waste & Litter Cabinet (link, link) is a great opportunity for Philadelphia to begin to control out waste & trash future. It is absolutely critical that we recognize the importance of illegal dumping in litter efforts. We need to tackle both illegal dumping and litter to get our streets to the cleanliness level that we want.
LA is using ArcMap, dashcam, GPS and cameras to develop detailed street cleanliness index. Click this link to see an interactive Story Map of this innovative use of GIS to tackle a pressing urban problem.
Cleanliness Indexes are available by 39,915 street segment and are summarized into operational grids.
Philadelphia, like LA, has a serious street trash problem. We need to dramatically improve our street cleanliness efforts. Following LA’s Clean Streets Index would be an excellent start for the Mayor’s Zero Waste & Litter Cabinet.
Posted in GIS
Tagged Illegal Dumping, Phila Zero Waste & Litter, Philadelphia litter
Many Philadelphians say that our streets are littered, we now have the numbers to back up that opinion. Here’s a comparison of 2015 and 2016 311 Illegal Dumping Service Requests City-wide and by Council District. We had 17,384 in 2016, 35% more than we had in 2015. While Illegal Dumping reports went up in all 10 Council Districts in 2016, Districts 2 and 5 saw 65% and 42% increases, respectively. District 3, on the other hand, only increased 11%.