Litterati: Cleaning Up Litter With Instagram

Image: Pixabay, Creative Commons CC0

Literati.org is on a mission to eradicate litter by crowdsourcing trash pickup, archiving the results in its Digital Landfill, and extracting data to prevent the original littering. As described in the profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, the site is already having a big impact: "The Digital Landfill, now home to more than 12,500 pieces of trash, is crowdsourced cleanup, and because the images are geo-tagged, Kirschner has been able to build a map that shows where each piece of trash was found. This kind of data could not only help raise litter awareness in urban areas but also alert the companies whose products often end up on the ground."

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"I feel we have become so desensitized to our surroundings," Kirschner said. "People walk over broken glass or a coffee cup or a potato chip bag and just keep going. I've reached a point where I'm no longer OK with that."
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On average, 100 photos are posted every day. "If 1 million people - which is a failure by social media standards - picked up one piece of trash per day, we could have a huge impact," he said.
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To Kathleen Russell, leader of Keep Dimond Clean, an Oakland neighborhood group that picks up 12,000 pounds of litter every year, Litterati is a step in the right direction: "The key that we were missing was the young people, and Litterati does that with social media."
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Because the Digital Landfill creates a record of how much litter a user has disposed of, Kirschner imagines that Litterati could be a tangible way for participants to track the impact they've had. It has already changed his family's purchasing habits. The Kirschners buy in bulk, avoid single-use packaging and are planning to bring reusable containers to restaurants for take-out.
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"If I were to turn (Litterati) off, 12,000 pieces of litter aren't on the ground, and I know two little kids who will never litter as long as they live," Kirschner said. "If that's the legacy of Litterati, then I'm OK with it. But I think there's an opportunity for it to be much more than that."