How does 'tagging' work and why?

Before you start capturing characteristics, it's good to consider why you're doing it. There can be multiple reasons for this. For example, you might be capturing it purely for yourself, to know how many things you have picked up. In that case, you wouldn't even need to give characteristics; you upload the photos and see the count of them.

But if you're doing it to really make an impact, then chances are you'll need characteristics. It's through those characteristics that you or others can do much more with it. But it's important to give the right characteristics so that you create 'good data' that can actually be used.

To do this, within LitterApp, we currently have several characteristics that you can fill in or not. How many and what kind of tags you use is up to you, but generally, 'the more info, the better'.

Below, the various characteristics are explained in more detail.

Material

Speaks for itself but can still be tricky. A candy wrapper is generally made of plastic, a pack of cigarettes usually of paper. But what about a bread bag that seems to be made of paper but has a plastic window in it, or a vape pen that consists of a metal casing, a plastic mouthpiece, a piece of electronics, a battery, and a multitude of other materials?

There isn't a direct answer for this. We tag the paper bag with a plastic window as 'paper' ourselves, but there's also an argument for adding 'plastic' as a second material. The same goes for the pack of cigarettes. If it's made of paper, you can indicate that; if there's a plastic wrapper around it, you can potentially add plastic as a material. However, you can also choose to make it into two items: the paper pack and the plastic wrapper.

Brand

This one is also self-explanatory but can be tricky as well. The brand is often found on the product, and we already have many brands in our lists, so type in part of it and see if it comes up.

What we mainly do here is to capture the brand on the product, without considering the parent company. So, we record a Twix (from the Mars group) as 'Twix' and M&M's as M&M's. In the background, we make sure to provide options where we can bundle all those products into the Mars group.

Content

Another self-explanatory one but can deviate from what you might expect. This concerns the content that could have originally been in the object and therefore is also a characteristic of the object. So, a cup is just a cup, but if you can indicate that the content was coffee, then it's a more specific description of that cup. Or if you find a can and indicate that the content was energy drink, that says more than just a can and is a different type of product than a can that had soda in it.

However, there are also special possibilities. For example, we have wine or beer, but also alcohol. The latter we really mean for bottles of spirits. Cans with mixed drinks can be indicated with Content = Cocktail, for example, a Bacardi-Cola, or a Cola-Jack Daniels.

Size/Weight

For some studies, it may be important to know how large an object is or what its weight is. You can optionally put these values here. For example, it's important to indicate whether the wire you found on the beach was 2 centimeters long or more than a meter.

State of the product

For several studies, such as research on the effectiveness of bottle and can deposits, it can be interesting to record the condition of the product found. For example, a can may still be 'as new' (and easy to return if it has a deposit) or it may be dented or even completely flat. For products found on the beach, it may be interesting to know if they are still new or completely worn out.

Intact, as good as new	Dented	Torn	Flat	Worn out by nature
				-no photo yet-

Event

An event is a special characteristic that may not directly relate to the article itself but rather to the event for which the product was collected. Think, for example, of everything collected during World Cleanup Day, or a monthly cleanup with your local group.

Quantity

The 'quantity' is a handy way for special items. Think, for example, of a place where there are a lot of balloons or cigarette butts. Instead of taking a photo of each cigarette butt, you can also take one photo of a bunch of cigarette butts and indicate the quantity.

Picked up

This may sound strange to some, as we're doing this to make the world a bit cleaner, why wouldn't you pick it up then? Good question, but there are also good reasons not to. For example, if it would involve a dangerous situation (think of something on the other side of the highway) or if it's too large or in the water and you can't reach it now etc. If you want to record it but not pick it up, you can turn this off for this photo. You can set the general setting in your profile.

Recycled

This is a characteristic that has been created for different people who indicate that they themselves have taken the effort to dispose of the waste separately (for example, glass in the glass bin, or plastic in the plastic container etc). This is independent of whether the company then burns all the plastic or actually recycles it.

Deposit

With Deposit, we indicate whether the item is a deposit item, think mainly of plastic bottles and cans, but also certain cups from McDonald's or beer glasses at a festival etc.

I'm missing one, what now?

Despite having reasonably filled lists, we are sure that we are missing values. It could be that it exists under a different name, but it's also possible that the list is not complete. In that case, contact us so we can see if we already have it under a different name (and possibly need to be named more clearly) or if it's missing and we need to add it. In the meantime, you can potentially add the choice 'Other missing value', but then you'll need to correct it later when we have added that value.

Those are quite a few characteristics, do I have to fill them all in?!

What's important to realize is that you record the characteristics primarily so that something can be done with that data, by yourself or by others. The more data, the better, but as mentioned earlier, try to find a workable situation for yourself.

Take, for example, a photo of a Redbull can. This can be tagged in multiple ways, and the most common way would be:

Photo	Tags
	Item: Can Brand: RedBull

And this is accurate data that you, or someone else, can use. For example, to answer a question like 'how many cans were found' or 'how many cans of the Redbull brand were found'.

If you're willing to make the effort, you can tell a lot more about it. Whether all that extra information is useful or a waste of your time, that's hard to answer; we probably won't know until we hear from people what data they use, but the following questions could, for example, be interesting for people that cannot be answered with just the first two characteristics given:

What percentage of the found cans are made of aluminum and how many of iron?
How many cans had a deposit and how many did not?
How many cans were simply thrown away with all the other waste and how many were kept separate for recycling?
How many cans were found that were still intact, or slightly dented, or flat, or torn into pieces (e.g., by a lawnmower)?
How many cans still had content or were not even opened yet?

These are just fictional questions, but they are questions that could be seriously important in the research into the effectiveness of can deposits in the Netherlands, but they are also questions that cannot be answered with just the first two characteristics given.

If you would like to answer the example questions, you would need to say something about those kinds of characteristics as well, and you might end up with the following:

Photo	Tags
	Item: Can Brand: RedBull Material: Aluminum Content: Energy drink State: Dented Deposit: Yes Recycled: Yes

As you can see, with these characteristics, you can already answer many questions (but not all), but it also becomes clear that it will take a lot of work to provide just one can with characteristics. And somewhere we'll have to find a balance or convenient way of working.

For example, if we know that serious research is being done into 'the condition of the can', then we could consciously ask to add that information. We could even ask people to check previously recorded cans and add that characteristic based on the photo.

Trying to record everything without knowing what the information need is, is actually a daunting task because even if we record all this, someone might appear who is interested in the size of the can, or whether the pull ring was still attached or not, or what the color of the can was, or the weight, the barcode etc etc.

The characteristics tell what the photo looked like

Finally, one last reason to think carefully about the characteristics you give.

You have a photo in front of you and through the characteristics, you indicate what is in that photo. The user of the data (yourself or someone else) later uses not the photo but the data recorded about that photo. It's therefore important to provide characteristics that give an accurate representation of the original photo.

That sounds complicated, so below are a few examples of original photos, possible characteristics, and what a user of that data might think based on the data (and why that could lead to wrong conclusions in research).

Take, for example, a photo of a paper milkshake cup with a lid and a straw in it that is recorded in the following way. Below is also one of the ways the researcher could interpret this information.

Photo	Characteristics	What the researcher thinks	How you could also tag it	What the researcher thinks
	Item: Cup Material: Paper Item: Lid Material: plastic Item: Straw Material: Paper		Item: Cup (with lid, record lid separately) Material: Paper Brand: KFC Item: Lid (with straw, record straw separately) Material: plastic Brand: KFC Item: Straw Material: Paper Brand: KFC