Litter Transects

Find a safe place  where you can collect data along a roadside, sidewalk, or other walkable area where litter often accumulates. For example, this might be a pathway on the side of a road, between a roadway and sidewalk, or along a walkway in the park. Follow the pathway generally - you don’t have to travel in a straight line. If the path turns, you turn.

From the edge of the pathway, visually estimate 1 m (about 3 ft) in width covering the area where litter accumulates. This is about the length from the center of your chest to the fingertips of your outstretched arm. Use Debris Tracker to record all litter items present in your 1 m wide transect. Track data for a minimum of 30 minutes in your selected location. Accumulation Areas

If you’re cleaning up an area with a lot of litter where you can’t conduct a transect, here are options for getting organized:

• Clean As You Go: Track in pairs and have one person log items in Debris Tracker while the other partner cleans up - this generates the most robust geospatial litter data!
• Clean First, Log Later: Sometimes it may be easier to pick up all the litter and then sort and count what you found all at once. While this doesn’t generate point-specific data on where litter is found, it can still be valuable in identifying broad patterns. If you’re in the same location where you collected the litter, you can sort and log the data in the Debris Tracker app. If you’re sorting in a different location than where you’ve collected litter, log in to your account on debristracker.org and select “Manually upload data.” You can enter the quantity and type of items you’ve found - just like in the app - and then select the location where the data was collected on a map. Like data from the app, manually uploaded data is part of Debris Tracker’s open database that is free and publicly accessible.