I started a program that rewards people for picking broken glass and cigarette butts off the beach AMA!

Usually when I hear ideas like this that will benefit the environment or help clean up the beaches, they sound great initially, but I highly doubt that they can be sustainable for a long period of time.

However, your project sounds awesome! The businesses have an incentive to encourage their customers to clean up the beaches to get people back in their business, and people have another incentive to clean up the beach.

That said, do any people from putting their own trash in the jars and getting the discount?

Are there any other organizations that have similar goals to yours but have failed? How are you doing things differently from them?

Thanks for making the world a better place my man!

Thanks for the kind words!

We were initially worried about people discarding their own trash- we use the businesses to help self police that kind of stuff, but it honestly hasn't been an issue. Part of offering the incentive is that it's something between 2-5 dollars. It's enough to make the effort worth it, but not so nice that it would be worth it to cheat. This has been a concern for the businesses and we haven't had any of them come back to us saying it's a problem, so I think we're doing something right!

Plenty of organizations do cleanups and plenty of organizations try to create buy in. I think a key point where we differ from those other programs is that we target the people in local businesses, most of which are residents of the community. When the businesses support the community, the community supports the businesses. If anything, the role of our project is to facilitate that relationship in the background rather than lead from the front and have everyone fall into place behind us.

A 16 oz container full of potentially harmful beach litter sounds like, well, alot. I am surprised anybody is really willing to do that much work for a free coffee.

How many of your 18 businesses from last year are participating this year?

All of them and then some!

And I totally agree about your 16 ounces comment, but there's a lot of small that are out there. I feel one container pretty much every time I go to the beach. I can fill one in 30 minutes if I'm getting after it.

So are people really doing 30 minutes of work on the beach in exchange for a free cup of coffee (and of course the satisfaction of helping out the community)? Or were most of the cups returned to businesses for rewards last year for bigger rewards? Do you know the average retail price of a reward that was actually collected?

This sounds like a really great idea that could be featured in a book like Freakonomics someday.

We ask our participating businesses to keep the incentives in the 2-5 dollar range. Some may be worth more to the person turning in a full container- 2-5 dollars for the business can be greater for the consumer, depending on the business. We've found that's the sweet spot for motivating people to take action without being so awesome that they'd cheat. Over the course of the summer last year, we estimated that we removed 800 gallons of small litter from the beach, 16 oz at a time.

I wonder what scale we'd have to reach to be freakonomics worthy..

I attend a festival that had something like this. They used to give a free ice cream cone to anyone for a 20oz soda bottle full of cigarette butts. It was a great idea but was eventually scrapped due to sanitary concerns.

At the beach you have cigarette butts, glass, all kind of plastic, etc... Do you provide people with latex/rubber gloves or things like alcohol wipes to keep potential cleaners, well... clean?

I know it sounds like a non-issue but you may be surprised by the amount of people who want to help but don't want to get their or their kid hands dirty or cut by random broken glass.

This is definitely a concern of ours. For the time being, we dont distribute any gloves. We educate people to be as safe as they can be, given the circumstances, but you raise a great point.

For glass, its typically not a big problem, so long as kids are supervised and everyone is being careful. For cigarette butts, we recommend people scoop them up with our containers, and then shake the sand out. Nobody wants to touch a gross cigarette butt (with their hand or their feet). This whole dilemma is kind of the point that I wish we could make to the people that leave them there - even the people who are willing to clean up after you have a hard time doing it.

Do you think it could be a possibility that someone litigates over injuring themselves trying to pick up broken glass to get the rewards? If so, then how do you respond in such a case?

I think the liability would lie more with whoever is responsible for the area in which the hazard was located, but I'd need to do some research. The precedent we've reviewed is situations where people are injured by hazardous objects in parking lots (rusty nails for example) and the owner of the parking lot being liable.

how's your dog?

He's good! Still hanging out on the beach when he can!

How do you get publicity for your project? Is it known to any public office or community organization?

Most of how we spread the word comes from the participating businesses. We lean on them a lot, but we also think they get something out of it. We reach out to various media sources to spread the word as well- the most recent being an article published on The Inertia's website.

What was the biggest obstacle you found while you were creating your organization?

Getting the attention of the first ten businesses. Once I had my "pitch" down and was better practiced at communicating our message, the rest were much easier. I found that I only had about 30 seconds to prove that I was worth listening to, so I had to get my point across accurately and quickly. This was not something that I had ever done before.

have you met any famous people ho have came out and helped?

Not outside of people who are sort of big deals locally.

Buncha great dogs though.

do you have plans for helping other beach cities kickstart a similar program?

Still trying to figure out the most effective way to accomplish this! Really, we need a solid point of contact to take the idea and run with it within each city.