Trash Free Trails is a community or riders, runners and roamers on a mission to protect our trails.
In short, they're bringing beach cleans in land.
This may seem like a simple premise but there is currently no research on the impact of terrestrial plastic pollution to wildlife and soil.
Until now.
Trash Free Trails not only make action through trail cleans and awareness events. They are the sole researchers into terrestrial pollution. This is really important is terrestrial pollution isn't at the mercy of currents or weather. It generally stays (and impacts) the spot it was dropped in.
This means there's a real chance to resolve this issue as it's down to us all as citizens.
And so onto the citizen science. The data collected so far is all down to the volunteers. Not only do they clean the trails. They also count and record this information too.
My role was to communicate this information. As riders, runners and roamers, we're all familiar with maps. The trails are navigated by maps. And so the data would be navigated by maps too.
The coastline was created by the total number of trash collected over time. The contours were constructed by nature connection data and the shipping lines depicted the most found brands. The most common of all being Lucozade.
You can find more information about all of this work as well as ways to get involved at trashfreetrails.org