Case Study: Rubbish achieves faster litter cleanup and team growth with Firebase

How Firebase helps Rubbish clean up San Francisco

Rubbish, a community app focused on reducing litter in San Francisco, needed a better way to store, organize, and share thousands of user-generated photos and reports across governments, partners, and social channels. The team chose Firebase to help build the backend infrastructure for its app and manage data validation, privacy, and distribution.

Using Firebase Cloud Storage, Firestore, Cloud Functions, Authentication, and Security Rules, Rubbish automated report review and sharing while creating dashboards to track neighborhood trends and submit verified reports to agencies like San Francisco 311. Firebase helped new engineers onboard three times faster, reduced development and maintenance effort, and enabled Rubbish to launch a pilot program in Polk Street and use data to guide local clean-up efforts and partnership decisions.

Rubbish

Emin Israfil

Co-Founder