With the growing climate crisis, there are many environmentally conscious people who have taken to cleaning up their local environment. However, seldom do they film themselves doing so in front of an online audience in the hundreds of thousands like Tik Tok star, Daniel Toben.
Steadily chewing on a head of romaine lettuce, Daniel Toben looks up from his lap into his web camera as he says, “I don’t think I am that good of a social media influencer, I haven’t posted in months.”
Regardless of whether Daniel believes he is a good influencer or not, he has an account boasting a following of over 700,000 people who tune in to see him pick up mounds of trash across his home state of North Carolina. Daniel, who looks like a young version of Christian Bale if he worked at Patagonia, scouts for trash impacted areas in North Carolina to do his part to clean up the pollution that weighs heavy on his mind.
“It's literally an activity that you don't think about while you're doing it, it's like a really good time to be in a creative space and think about anything."
— Daniel Toben
Though Toben hasn’t posted in a while, his loyal fan base and some newcomers that get tied into the “#SustainabilityTok” algorithm tune in to see him trudge through the metallic sounds of soda cans, hollow bottles and crunchy wrappers amongst other remnants of convenience that are strewn about the area Toben intends to pick clean. Toben says that he doesn’t often hear these sounds as he’s usually blasting German EDM, thrash metal or the Conan O’brien podcast to the dismay of his doctor who says that he’s going to blow an eardrum one day. When Daniel first started doing trash cleanups in college at NC state, he didn’t listen to anything at all.
Courtesy of Instagram
“It's literally an activity that you don't think about while you're doing it, it's like a really good time to be in a creative space and think about anything,” Daniel said.
Daniel grew up in a liberal and environmentally minded family so conversations about the state of the environment as well as being immersed in nature was a prevalent part of his childhood. He also attended a Quaker highschool located in the middle of the woods where he took classes on sustainability. This upbringing gave Daniel an affinity for nature and curiosity about exploring different ways he could help upkeep the environment. In college while studying engineering, Daniel tried to keep up with classes and his passion for the environment by combining the two.
“My first semester there, I was really exploring every single different avenue for being environmentally conscious and making environmentally conscious choices. So I was eating vegetarian. I was saving electricity. I was purchasing things that were plastic free even. I was a mechanical engineering student. So I built an exercise bike that charged a car battery in my dorm room and then I could power my things from,” Daniel said.
During his freshman year, Daniel saw an opportunity to clean up off campus in the neighboring woods and saw it as an opportunity to spend time in nature and to take part in an activity to clean up his local environment. A few times a week, Daniel and usually one other student would go out and clean up trash out of a stream in the woods near his school. It was within this time that Daniel started to pick up on pollution patterns. The stream that he would routinely clean up, went through his school, picking up any debris that had been on the ground or carried through its waterways.
“It was stuff that had been washed down drains ending up in the stream. And then this stream went right through campus. If you were to look at NC State campus horizontally, right across, you could see it on a map,” Daniel said.
This pathway amounted to mounds of trash that Daniel would pick up with his leather gloves until he learned that rubber gloves would be better to keep the water out as he plunged into waste polluted waterways. He describes the amount of trash he would find as shocking as he was able to fill several trash bags at a time. According to the research firm Verisk Maplecroft, the average American produces 1,704 pounds of trash a year. With this in mind, Daniel knew that he was not solving the world’s problems by picking up a small fraction of the littered trash in his small college town. Yet, he still felt like he was making a difference while creating a safe space for himself to decompress and reflect on his daily experience as a new college student.
“I think it symbolized something...it symbolized the same kind of cluttered feeling that I think we can all get when we're in a new environment. I was a freshman in college. You can get kind of overwhelmed with everything going on. Cleaning up that stream was me cleaning up my own mind in a way where I was getting to feel more comfortable at campus.” Daniel said.
Daniel has learned a lot since his college days; he learned that wearing leather gloves while picking up trash submerged in water is never a good idea because it feels like you’re wearing someone else’s hands, where to find the best cleanup sites and how to build a following.
Daniel’s Tik Tok journey was not linear nor was it the traditional rise of an aspiring influencer. In fact, his aim was not to be an influencer at all. After he graduated from North Carolina State, Daniel wanted to take his climate activism to the next level by starting his own non-profit. To get more insight on how to start a non-profit, he applied to Reddit community page geared towards aspiring non-profit owners. Part of the requirement to gain entry to the page was to have a small online presence and a post with a minimum of 200 likes. Daniel, who had little social media experience and almost no following, came up with the idea to film himself and a friend pick a trash polluted ravine in his area completely clean. When Daniel initially posted the time lapse video online, he had hoped to hit the mark of 200 likes. Over 100,000 likes and thousands of supportive comments later, Daniel decided to go beyond Reddit and continue to shoot similar videos of himself doing self-guided cleanups on Tik Tok when the app began to rise in popularity.
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Courtesy of Instagram
While Daniel doesn’t typically mind doing cleanups on his own, he doesn’t feel so alone due to the hundreds of messages he gets saying how much he inspired them to start doing their own cleanups. One particularly moving message that Daniel received came from a 13 year old boy who said he never feels alone picking up trash in his local area because he knows that Daniel is out there doing it too. When the weight of reality sinks in when Daniel thinks of the enormity of the climate crisis and his small part in trying to curtail it, comments like this make it worth it for him to go forward.
Daniel said that most of the trash he found and continues to find today is an accumulation of the last five years. However, there are times when he finds articles of trash that are far older; like his brother’s stolen bike that had ended up in a ravine after years had passed and it was long forgotten.
Daniel said that more recently, he’s been faced with a more modern and potentially threatening, long-term pollutant that has entered his local community-disposable personal protective equipment or PPE
Disposable PPE has become an everyday staple for most people and as easy to find and buy as a bag of chips. While disposable PPE is just as accessible as many of the household conveniences that Daniel finds the remnants of in the areas he cleans up, he recognizes the importance of disposable PPE as it has saved and continues to save the lives of essential workers and those vulnerable to Covid-19. He said that it was nonetheless worrying to see PPE pollution find its way to the top of the top ten list of pollutants he would find during his cleanups.
While Daniel considers himself to be a steward of the environment and seeing this pollution worries him as it makes its way around the trash train, he knows that it is just temporary and that the other readily available options decrease the usage of disposable PPE. Daniel believes that the influx of PPE pollution is an indicator of how people respond during times of crisis.
“It is the kind of indicator for how much people cared or how people would respond to a new situation where they have new trash that they have to deal with. What I found was that people were just littering that stuff [disposable PPE] more than anything else. It was something that people deliberately litter and I don't know the motivation or motivations for that,” Daniel said.
Part of the reason why Daniel is concerned about mask pollution is the fact that disposable PPE has microplastic that is extremely harmful to the wildlife that consumes it and the area that the pollutant ends up. From a street gutter to a river, disposable PPE is a pollutant that will be caught in the cycle of plastic pollution for years to come.
The Covid-19 pandemic threw the world into a tailspin with healthcare workers and everyday people alike begging for proper protection from a virus no one saw coming. Disposable PPE quickly became a hot ticket item as their use seemed to be a way to prevent transmission of the virus. With time and high demand, disposable PPE became easier to access as people began their new normal, which chiefly meant staying boarded up inside unless it was absolutely necessary to leave.
The stay-at-home orders were difficult for many to contend, for some, comply with. The consensus of whether or not the stay-at-home orders were effective or worth complying with was split across the political spectrum. What was an issue of science and public safety quickly became a matter of debate as the virus was politicized.
The stay-at-home orders all but froze the flow of daily life, and thus cut down on air emissions and other environmental ills caused by daily personal and industrial transit. Though the pandemic temporarily amounted to clearer skies, the pollution created by non- essential and essential plastics, including PPE, has a long lasting effect that climate activists like Daniel fear.
The Covid-19 pandemic has unearthed social, economic and environmental threats on top of the existing health crisis. There have been efforts to address these supplemental issues, the highest priority has always been public safety. While this approach to the pandemic has saved many lives, it’s environmental toll has had a bigger environmental toll than most have the bandwidth to deal with as the Delta variant continues to concern.
Though studies about Covid-19 continue to be published and consumed by the public, studies that address the environmental impact of Covid-19 are few and far between. According to a scientific article entitled,”Increased plastic pollution due to COVID-19 pandemic: Challenges and recommendations”, out of all the published studies on Covid-19, “…approximately 20% addressed the effect of COVID-19 disease on waste and plastic pollution.”
According to National Geographic “Globally, 65 billion gloves are used every month. The tally for face masks is nearly twice that—129 billion a month. That translates into 3 million face masks used per minute.” Most PPE is made from a variety of microplastics, most commonly polypropylene, that can remain in the environment for decades, even centuries, much to the detriment of the already downtrodden environment. With tangible evidence of climate change becoming more prevalent, there is a struggle to protect both the health and safety of individuals and the environment.
In the Los Angeles area, PPE pollution has seen one of the largest manifestations of PPE pollution in the oceanic environment. The Heal the Bay Foundation, known for their waste tracker, listed disposable PPE as their top 10 waste items found on Los Angeles’ most prominent beaches. Similar to Daniel, Heal the Bay Foundation hosts their own cleanups. At their 32nd annual Coastal Cleanup Day, Heal the Bay’s volunteer quota tips the scale at 2,735 people who signed up to clean up 35 sites across Southern California. During this state-wide cleanup alone, volunteers collected 5,000 pounds of trash.
Courtesy of Instagram
Coastal and Marine Scientist at Heal the Bay, Emily Parker, has been a large proponent of the Coastal Cleanup Day and the fight against “big plastic” since she started working for Heal the Bay five years ago. In an article she penned for Heal the Bay entitled “Fighting Big Plastic from My Living Room”, she detailed her struggle to stay plastic-free while sheltering in place and how readers could avoid using plastic as well.
“Over the course of the past month, all of our lives in the US have changed drastically. Those who are fortunate enough to have a place to live are isolated in their homes, distanced from loved ones. More and more people fall ill every day, vulnerable communities are suffering disproportionately, and our governments and healthcare systems are pushed to the brink. Yet, all the while, Big Plastic does not sleep,” Parker said.
Parker says that through community outreach and education Heal the Bay and other environmentally minded organizations such as Surfriders Foundation have been able to push the plastic-free mindset. As the vaccine opens borders for those sheltering in place and waiting to enjoy the freedom of the outdoors again, Parker is worried about the future of plastic pollution as well. She says that while she recognizes the importance of proper protection, in order to curtail the spread of disposable PPE pollution, which she says plays into the big plastic agenda, people must be more mindful about their choices. From opting to a reusable option, to disposing of the PPE properly in the correct landfill disposal bin, Parker says that anything is better than it being carried far away and possibly found years into the future.
To Daniel, trash is a form of a time capsule where one can look back at the past to see what life was like before the item was littered. He believes that disposable PPE shows how people responded to a new plastic pollutant in a time of crisis. More than anything, what Daniel would like people, including his following, to know is that though it is essential, disposable PPE is not the last option. He openly advocates for the vaccines and speaks about the fact that disposable PPE is not recyclable at all. While Daniel knows this issue will not go away overnight, he continues to share educational information with his followers so if he must pick up sopping wet gloves and masks in the future,he will not be doing so alone.
