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Waste & Recycling August 21, 2017 09:30:04 AM

Can a Digital Landfill Get Rid of the World of Litter?

Waste Advantage
ScrapMonster Author
So far, Litterati has cataloged over 750,000 pieces of litter from 114 countries, with hundreds being added every day.

Can a Digital Landfill Get Rid of the World of Litter?

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): Can picking up litter be fun? A resounding yes comes from the community of Litterati, an app that asks users to identify, photograph and geotag individual pieces of trash before disposing of them.

It’s a simple enough idea: crowdsourcing data that could help stop litter from being created in the first place. So far, Litterati has cataloged over 750,000 pieces of litter from 114 countries, with hundreds being added every day. “It’s a small sample, but it’s already proving effective,” says Jeff Kirschner, who started it all with a photo of a cigarette butt.

The idea of Litterati came to Oakland entrepreneur Kirschner while he was hiking with his daughter. She saw a plastic tub of kitty litter that had been dumped in the water and noted that it shouldn’t have been there. “It was an innocent but insightful comment and it got me thinking,” says Kirschner.

“It reminded me of when I was a kid at summer camp, and before visiting day everybody would go pick up five pieces of litter — it didn’t take long to clean up the whole camp.”

Kirschner started toying with ideas on how to apply that model to the entire planet, and one day posted a photo of a cigarette butt he found in the street on Instagram. “Pretty soon I noticed I had 50 photos of litter on my phone and I had picked up each and every piece I had shot. I was keeping a record of the positive impact I was having on the planet,” he says. That was the start of Litterati, which launched in 2012 as an Instagram hashtag.

Instagram made photos of litter “artistic and approachable,” but Litterati has since become its own entity, having launched an iOS app in 2016 and, more recently, an Android version: “Instagram isn’t designed for creating a litter free world,” explains Kirschner, “We wanted to design a user experience more aligned with our objective, and have more control over the data we were capturing and what we could do with it.”

The app allows users to take photos of litter and then select the most appropriate hashtag for each one, before uploading them along with the exact GPS coordinates of each find.

Courtesy: https://wasteadvantagemag.com

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