From pieces to pounds
How do we measure the full impact of our efforts?
When you walk through a park or hike your favorite trail, it might seem like picking up a single plastic water bottle or a few candy wrappers won’t make a dent in our global litter problem. But like small raindrops that fill a pond, these small acts add up—and weigh more than you think.
At Delete Litter, we think of litter in the context of pieces: “I picked up 100 pieces today,” or “We cleaned up 1,000 pieces of litter in our neighborhood last month.”
Just getting more people to think about litter is an important part of how we’re making a difference.
And what happens when we consider litter pieces in the context of combined weight and volume—vivid, tangible measures of trash we've removed from our streets, parks, trails, or waterways and disposed of properly?
Recent studies show that an average piece of litter weighs about 10 to 20 grams (roughly 0.02 to 0.04 pounds), depending on type and environment. We've adopted the conservative end of the range: 10 grams per piece.
Now imagine you and the Delete Litter community eliminated 10,000 pieces of litter over a few months' time. That’s not just 10,000 little love letters to the world around us—it’s over 220 pounds of litter disposed of properly. That’s equivalent to clearing out more than 8 large trash bags and is about 10% heavier than the average U.S. adult male.
You don't need to imagine it, because together we've deleted more than 10,000 pieces of litter in our first few months, logging 130+ cleanups in over 40 communities around the world. And we're just getting started!
And what if we zoomed out even wider? A billion pieces of litter deleted—the North Star for our collective annual impact by 2030—would weigh in at about 22 million pounds (over 10,000 metric tons).
That’s enough trash to fill over 1,000 standard garbage trucks!
Of course, such big numbers can feel abstract, which is why we just launched the beta version of our Delete Litter Impact Estimate. Our mobile app now converts your everyday efforts into a clear and compelling estimate of the weight and volume of litter you've deleted, plus how many trash bags that equals. It’s a simple way to show that even the tiniest actions can create a massive ripple in short period of time.
We believe that translating “pieces” to “pounds” can help us better understand and articulate the true weight of our collective impact. Our DLIE reframes each cleanup as not just an isolated act of good, but as a meaningful contribution to a cleaner, healthier, more connected world.
Over the next several months, our team will also be validating and refining our initial assumptions based on third-party research with our own litter deletion data—thanks to real-world cleanups like yours.
So next time you head out for a walk, bring a bag. Bonus if you bring a grabber. Pick up a piece. Or ten. Or a hundred. Log your cleanup in the Delete Litter app and watch your impact grow.
Remember: your seemingly small action isn’t just picking up a piece of litter—it powers a growing movement of community care and pride, measured not just in pieces, but in pounds.
Let’s keep deleting, one piece—and pound—at a time.
sources: Frontiers in Marine Science (2021); Environmental Pollution (2024); CDC National Center for Health Statistics (2021/22)
main photo credit: Jas Min on Unsplash
Download the Delete Litter app today!