Talking Trash: A Reddit AMA with Rubbish

On Earth Day, the Rubbish team did a live AMA on Reddit. Full disclosure: I don’t Reddit, and was curious and unsure about what types of questions we would receive during an “Ask Me Anything”. Emin, Felipe, Adam, and I (the team!) were excited to share our experience and talk trash.

At 8 am, we formed a virtual war-room via FaceTime and for the rest of the day, rapid-fire answered questions about why we care so much about litter. There was a lot of talk about data, poop, and how we are committed to growing our company Rubbish with the challenges of being in one of the most expensive cities in the United States.

There were questions about litter origins:

Our take on litter origins.

And questions about how San Francisco improving the conditions of the streets:

There’s a bunch of things cities can do to reduce litter — these are just some.

We were asked several times our most memorable moment from picking up litter, which brought out some other folks who’ve been helped by a stranger:

True story.

There were many questions about trash can placement, common litter, and cigarettes — including a few talking about cigarette facts:

Never too much cigarette butt talk.

In fact, Rubbish worked with Hey Social Good (thanks Cindy!) to evaluate the potential impact of cigarettes. We learned that one cigarette can contaminate 1,000 liters of water. With that assumption, the 35,574 cigarette butts picked up using the Rubbish Platform in 2019 successfully prevented the contamination of 35,574,000 liters of water (or 150,362,505 - 8oz Red Bull cans, or 9,397,656 gallons of milk). Holy smokes.

Some questions were very up our alley:

We’re spending a lot of COVID-19 time planning this…

Sign up for a Rubbish Beam here!

We were delighted by the amount of engagement in the discussion; sometimes we couldn’t even answer before someone else did:

We love a good conversation.

And some joking along the way:

Humor is always great.

Many a pun.

We talked about why we decided to do this:

There are many reasons — but these are the ones that were top of mind for us.

People asked how we took this chance, and we were happy to share our truth:

Money helps — but that wasn’t the case for us.

And how:

It’s an uphill battle, but we love it.

Another true story.

And some inspiring messages, that I may look back to on days when going gets hard:

Thanks, beautiful stranger, for your motivating words!

Yes — yes you can. Please email us at hello@rubbish.love.

It was fun to see our team, socially distant, answering questions, and enjoying the conversation.

We had a great day. Thanks to everyone who asked a question and spent some time with us on Earth Day!

You can check out our full r/iAMA here.

Please email me at elena@rubbish.love with any trash thoughts — I’d love to hear from you.