ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The #TrashTag hashtag found its way to the Tampa Bay area and that is a good thing.
The social media craze started a couple years ago. Participants pick a meet-up spot on social media. Then they clean it, picking up trash in a big do-gooder group.
Pictures of #trashtag efforts are then posted on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with that hot hashtag.
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Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Nick Meza has watched the Tampa Bay area grow... and get messier.
“Sleepy St. Pete turned into a hustle-bustle young city,” says Meza, a father of four who works at Jabil. “More people moving down, bringing more trash. You see if littering the streets, littering the waterways.”
He started #TrashTagTampaBay on Facebook.
“If I could just get a hundred people out here for an hour a week, the impact could be huge,” says Meza, who this week gathered a group of #trashtaggers at St. Pete’s Mirror Lake.
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Meza will host his own #trashtag events, but he's also posting about other meetups around the area and local #trashtag pictures — anything to keep his hometown clean.
“It really is such a small amount of effort to go out there," says Meza. "Pick up a little bit of trash and keep this stuff out of our waterways."
