Anyone can join: Dreckspotz app for clean mountains: Fight plastic waste
Garbage in nature is a global problem and plastic in particular is now ubiquitous, not just in the oceans. Even remote high-alpine habitats are affected. But how much of the “dirt” is actually in our nature?, the environmentalists from Global 2000 call themselves. The so-called DreckspotzApp was developed together with the Innsbruck University and the Alpine Club. “With the help of the app, you can help us to collect data for our garbage in the nature report,” the environmentalists want to get as many people as possible excited about the campaign via their website.
Anyone can participate! Simply download the app to your cell phone. And collect data together to find long-term solutions to the garbage problem on the mountains. “The app is designed as a citizen science project. This data can also help us to identify waste hotspots, to better understand the problem of waste pollution in nature and to find possible solutions,” emphasizes Global 2000.
In order to obtain correspondingly valid data, various initiatives are joining forces. The Austrian Alpine Association, various schools, nature lovers and private individuals as so-called “Citizen Scientists” will use the Dreckspotz app to comb the high mountains, note any garbage found in the app and immediately dispose of the “corpus delicti”.
“With the Dreckspotz app, we not only want to make nature cleaner, but also ensure that it stays that way in the long term. With this cooperation, we want to help ensure that the alpine region destined for Austria receives more attention. So far, more than 200,000 waste finds have been registered by the Dreckspotz-Usen. We are pleased that so many people are committed to counteracting the plastic problem,” says Global 2000 expert Lisa Grasl.
Uni Innsbruck the coordinated data
The University of Innsbruck is now tackling this problem. As part of the three-year Sparkling Science research project, the data situation is being updated together with the littering app “Dreckspotz” published by GLOBAL 2000.
Klemens Weisleitner from the Institute of Ecology at the University of Innsbruck explains: “We look forward to working together, because our research depends on the help of the public. Only together can we get an overview of the spread of plastic in the high mountains in order to then identify targeted measures.”
How the plastic got into the sensitive regions is difficult to understand in individual cases, but the causes can be traced back to several roots. In addition to local sources such as alpine tourism (construction activities, gastronomy, skiers, hikers), entries from great distances are also possible due to wind transport.
But the app is not only intended to catalog the rubbish, but above all to address it: the general public must be aware that plastic waste is also a problem right on our doorstep.