The Making of Trash Data Visualization

Online Trash Map

Introduction

In August 2018 HOT together with Nipe Fagio organized waste data collection activity, allocating more than 100 students/mappers to locate and collect information about the types of piles in the Dar es salaam City.

The aim of this activity was to raise awareness to the responsible institutions for waste management about the importance of data-driven decision and policy making and also to showcase how waste data can be used to measure and evaluate the waste collection problem in Dar es salaam.

The activity resulted into collection of more than 10,000 waste piles. After the activity the HOT team presented the data to TURP program.

Visualizing the trash data

As part of TURP team, we analyzed the data and built a web map that visualized and provide important insights for the nearly 10,000 points. We used Mapbox GL JS together with a React framework, these enabled creating a vector based web map that has high rendering performance and a smooth user interaction.

The trash web map can be accessed here and source code for the map here.