No Littering Emoji

A person tossing a piece of trash, with the red prohibition circle overlaid. 🚯 means no littering. The silhouette specifically shows the offending action, not a trash can, which is what distinguishes the pictogram from just 🗑️. Unicode's official name is DO NOT LITTER SYMBOL, which points at the subtext: most litter signs address behavior, not the waste itself.

Real-world installation skews heavily toward parks, beaches, roadside picnic areas, and urban centers with aggressive anti-litter campaigns. Singapore, notably, built a national identity around its 1968 "Keep Singapore Clean" campaign, with first-time littering fines now up to S$2,000 and Corrective Work Orders requiring up to 12 hours of public cleaning. The 🚯 sign is posted everywhere, and the threat is enforced.

Added in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) at codepoint U+1F6AF, pulled from Japanese carrier emoji sets. Japan, like Singapore, built anti-litter culture into its mobile UI vocabulary decades before Western platforms had an equivalent.

Three clear modes.

Public-space etiquette: parks departments, local government accounts, and ecology nonprofits use 🚯 in reminders and PSAs. Especially common around long weekends and festival season, when parks fill up and cleanup crews get overwhelmed.

Environmental activism: ocean-cleanup groups, coastal-conservation accounts, and anti-plastic advocates use 🚯 in posts about marine debris. The Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup has tracked cigarette butts as the top litter item at every cleanup since 1986. 🚯 frequently accompanies these data posts.

Metaphorical "don't drop trash in my X" use: "don't litter my feed 🚯," "🚯 in the group chat" (telling people to stop sending junk). A relatively fresh usage, growing since 2022 as internet slang.

The emoji works best in signage-adjacent contexts and loses impact in vague motivational posts. Unlike 🚫 or 🔞, 🚯 has a specific referent (litter) that doesn't flex easily into abstract metaphor.

Anti-littering signage became universal quickly after it became a legal concern. US urban areas began installing "No Dumping" and "No Littering" signs in the 1950s, part of the postwar highway boom and the first wave of modern public-space rulemaking. Lady Bird Johnson's 1965 Highway Beautification Act pushed federal guidance on roadside trash.

Singapore turned it into national doctrine. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's 1968 "Keep Singapore Clean" campaign paired posters, fines, and uniformed enforcement into a decade-long behavioral reshaping. The same year, the international 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs spread standardized prohibition pictograms globally. Japan followed with anti-litter signs in parks, tourist sites, and train stations.

The International Coastal Cleanup launched in 1986 under the Ocean Conservancy, and has tracked cigarette butts as the top litter item at every cleanup since. The 🚯 sign became the visual shorthand for this kind of public-space etiquette, installed on every park gate from Glasgow to Osaka.

Unicode adopted 🚯 in version 6.0 on October 11, 2010, at codepoint U+1F6AF, with the official (deliberately blunt) name DO NOT LITTER SYMBOL. Pulled from Japanese carrier sets where anti-litter iconography had been part of mobile UI since the 1990s.

1. 1950US urban areas start installing modern 'No Dumping' and 'No Littering' signs alongside postwar highway expansion.
2. 1965Lady Bird Johnson's Highway Beautification Act pushes federal US guidance on roadside anti-litter standards.
3. 1968Lee Kuan Yew launches Singapore's 'Keep Singapore Clean' campaign. Anti-litter enforcement becomes national policy.
4. 1968Vienna Convention on Road Signs standardizes international prohibition pictograms including anti-litter signage.
5. 1986Ocean Conservancy launches the International Coastal Cleanup. Cigarette butts top the list of collected items every year since.
6. 1987Singapore's litter laws tighten with higher minimum fines.
7. 1992Singapore introduces Corrective Work Orders requiring public cleaning labor as punishment.
8. 2010Unicode 6.0 adds 🚯 on October 11 at codepoint U+1F6AF, official name DO NOT LITTER SYMBOL.
9. 2025Ocean Conservancy's [peer-reviewed study confirms plastic bag bans reduce bag litter 25-47%](https://oceanconservancy.org/newsroom/press-release/2025/06/19/statement-peer-reviewed-study-of-ocean-conservancy-cleanup-data-confirms-effectiveness-of-plastic-bag-bans/).

• •Cigarette butts have been the most-collected litter item at every International Coastal Cleanup since 1986, accounting for 30-40% of all items picked up annually.
• •Globally, about 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered each year, amounting to roughly 845,000 tons of litter. Filters are plastic and don't biodegrade.
• •Singapore's first-time littering fine is up to S$2,000. Repeat offenders face up to S$10,000 plus Corrective Work Orders, public cleaning duty in an orange vest.
• •Global plastic waste generation is projected to hit 460 million tonnes in 2025, with 33 billion pounds entering oceans annually.
• •Peer-reviewed Ocean Conservancy research in 2025 confirmed that plastic-bag bans reduce bag litter by 25-47% in cities and states that enact them.
• •Unicode's official name for 🚯 is DO NOT LITTER SYMBOL, one of the few Unicode emoji names written as an imperative sentence rather than a noun phrase.
• •The International Coastal Cleanup in 2024 removed over 1,000,000 plastic bags from coastlines worldwide in a single year.

• •Singapore's 'Keep Singapore Clean' campaign (1968): a Lee Kuan Yew authoritarian-era behavior modification program that became the country's signature civic identity. Tourists reference 🚯 in travel posts about Singaporean cleanliness.
• •Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup: annual global event since 1986, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Cigarette butts have topped the list every year.
• •The Ocean Cleanup project: Boyan Slat's organization confirmed in 2025 that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can be cleaned up for $7.5 billion. 🚯 commonly appears in commentary about prevention as cheaper than cleanup.
• •Lady Bird Johnson's 1965 Highway Beautification Act: early US federal effort that shaped interstate anti-litter signage and indirectly the 🚯 aesthetic.

• •🚯 is codepoint U+1F6AF. Unicode name: DO NOT LITTER SYMBOL.
• •Common shortcodes: :do_not_litter::do_not_litter:, :no_littering::no_littering: on various platforms.
• •Paired naturally with 🗑️ (wastebasket) and ♻️ (recycling) for full anti-litter content.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.