Compared to Japan, North America and much of Europe, England is covered in litter. A 2015 study into our litter problem revealed that it has barely improved in the last decade and experts now believe that trying to clean it up costs taxpayers up to £850 million a year. It kills animals, damages the environment and encourages criminal behaviour. Until now, there’s been little engagement with younger generations to tackle litter but one app has started to take out the trash one snap at a time.
Meet Litterati: a photography app fighting litter with a lens. The original idea was simple; see a piece of litter, take a photo, post and tag it on Instagram with #litterati, then pick it up and put it where it belongs. Popularity forced the project from Instagram and Litterati’s own app has taken over. Now you can tag the brand or type of litter and exactly where and when you found it.
You might think an app for photographing filth wouldn’t exactly fly off the cyber shelves. You’d be wrong. Founder Jeff Kirschner clearly tapped into the thoughts of an entire age group. We are the “a picture’s worth a thousand words” generation and Kirschner knew how to start that conversation. Founded in 2016, Litterati has exploded across the world and now operates in 113 countries. It’s a community that’s “crowd-source cleaning” the planet.
Litterati doesn’t just highlight and handle individual pieces of litter: it also holds people accountable. Tagging brands makes it much harder for those firms to ignore the problem they’re causing. The work of the Litterati community is quickly building maps and fingerprints of each city’s rubbish. The data can be used to find the source of the litter and then perhaps a solution.
Take San Francisco. The Golden Gate city had a real problem with cigarette butts. They sent out surveyors with clipboards to record the number of fag ends they found and then levied a tax on the tobacco firms. Naturally Satan’s smoking minions took issue and sued, arguing that the city could’t prove its allegations. So San Francisco asked Kirschner and his app-based advocates if they could help. Within four days they had amassed a myriad of litter locaters (left) and enough evidence not only to dismiss the lawsuit but to get the tax doubled. That tax generates an extra $4m a year for the city’s clean-up efforts.
Litterati’s application extends way beyond its home state of California. Using the collated data, we can dive right into our own city and see what’s been found in London. The global map is currently only available online but Kirschner told Felix that they’re planning to build it into the app. Londoners will soon be able to explore their road through the rubbish others have found and get involved themselves.
The UK is currently the third largest Litterati user group, behind the US and Netherlands. Shockingly, it isn’t London earning us the bronze medal but Liverpool, as seen by the active users map (left). Londoners are being spectacularly outdone by our neighbours up north and that’s not okay. It’s time to pull our fingers out, get posting and show Merseyside no mercy – help our capital city become the Queen of Clean.
Everyone can do their bit. The project relies on individuals getting together to form a worldwide trash task-force. The aim is to create a litter-free world and as Litterati expands, real progress is being made. Kirschner knows they’ve still got a long way to go. “We’ve got a whole planet to clean – we’re just getting started,” he told Felix.
He’s an easy man to believe, having already taken on the tobacco giants and saved cities millions in just a few months. Kirschner’s app has stopped rubbish blending into the background and made it artistic and approachable for everyone. We love nothing better than amateur photography and Litterati gives us a chance to post more than just selfies. We get to record and keep track of a positive impact we’ve made on our planet – beats #SaltBae any day, don’t you think?
Download Litterati free from the App Store today. An app for Android users is on its way; sign up to get an arrival notification on their website.
The post Litterati: The App Helping Londoners See Litter in a Different Light appeared first on Felix Magazine.
Litterati: The App Helping Londoners See Litter in a Different Light posted first on http://www.felixmagazine.com/
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