César González Fernández explains how CSFN grew from an Instagram hashtag into a global cleanup movement with 8 billion reasons to act.
From an Instagram hashtag to a global app — what was the turning point?
The real turning point came during the pandemic, when my co-founder Lester and I finally had the time to go into full bootstrap mode and build the CSFN app. We engaged closely with our community to validate the concept, and studied all the reviews — positive and negative — of existing apps on the market at the time. We officially launched in 2022.
With the Global Plastics Treaty stalling, do you still believe in top-down regulation?
Top-down regulation is absolutely necessary — but change won’t happen unless all stakeholders in our society, starting with us as individual citizens, recognise their own role. What matters most is understanding that everyone has a part to play: politicians, companies, schools, municipalities, civil society. We are 8 billion strong.
Citizens, companies, municipalities — who’s driving the most impact?
In our case at Clean Something for Nothing, it is companies — through their CSR and ESG initiatives — that are currently driving the most impact. That said, we’ve also partnered with the municipalities of Steinfort and Mersch, including their kindergartens, and have run numerous workshops and clean-ups with schools across Luxembourg. Kids absolutely love litter-picking!
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One more thing worth highlighting: our community is now active in 84 countries. Together, we have completed over 8,200 clean-ups and collected more than 925,000 kg of waste. To put that into perspective: if you lined up the bags end to end, they would stretch 133 km — roughly the distance of a round trip from Luxembourg to Metz.
