A trend has started spreading all throughout the internet and environmentally-conscious millennials are behind its viral state.
It seemed like every week, there is a new challenge carried all over the world through hashtags as popularized by social media. The willingness of millennials and netizens to participate in these challenges makes these trends viral enough to reach a high number of hits on different social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. This chain reaction continues until more and more people have participated.
The challenges are prompts to be tackled by the users who would post their accomplishment via social media. While there are some tasks that are not so significant, a number of challenges have a purpose that could positively affect different aspects in one's life like psychology, the environment, health, and others. A few of the most popular challenges are the #InsideOutChallenge which promoted mental health awareness and the #IceBucketChallenge which raised money for ALS research.
This time, the viral challenge is to take a photo of a messy, polluted public area, clean up the mess, and take another photo after the clean-up has been done. This challenge is dubbed as #TrashTag. The clever tag is obviously a play on the words trash and hashtag and is currently trending in social media. The goal of #TrashTag is to encourage people to clean up their surroundings and to take initiative in moving towards a cleaner environment. The challenge works like a clean-up drive and is showing positive results. Social media users are posting before and after photos of river banks, beaches, and parks. Some take a photo of themselves participating in the cleanup process, while some show off the trash bags that they have filled up.
Looking back, #TrashTag isn't new at all. It was started in 2005 by UCO Gear, an outdoor lighting company. Back then, the main purpose of #TrashTag was to push people to pick up litter as they went on their day-to-day lives. Since then, the popularity of #TrashTag started to spread out but at a slow pace.
UCO Gear is thrilled that the cause they started has touched today's youth and that the sudden surge in popularity of their green initiative was because people are actually taking part in it. UCO Gear further stated that the great outdoors is meant to be clean and should be kept as such.
More #TrashTag campaign details can be found in the UCO Gear website.
