The CEO of Litterati Is on a Mission to Create a Litter-Free World

Litterati is a community that is “crowdsource-cleaning” the planet, one piece at a time. We have designed a mobile application that anyone can use to identify, map, and catalog each piece of litter. Through that process, we’re empowering individuals to become part of the solution while collaboratively building a Global Database of Litter. Our mission is to create a litter-free world.

It all started on a walk in the woods when my four-year-old daughter noticed that someone had thrown a plastic tub of cat litter into a creek. “Daddeeeeee, that doesn’t go there,” she said. Sure, I’d seen litter before. But that moment, witnessed through a child’s eyes, opened mine. I began to notice litter everywhere: sidewalks, streets, and playgrounds. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place that prides itself on being eco-conscious and environmentally friendly. Then I remembered a lesson I learned as a kid at summer camp. Just before our parents visited, our camp director would instruct us each to pick up five pieces of litter. Two hundred kids times five pieces per kid equaled a cleaner camp. So I thought, Why not apply that “crowdsourced-cleaning” model to the entire planet? That was when Litterati was born.

We heard about the TakePart + Lenovo contest from a family member. We decided to apply because we believe that Litterati embodies the spirit of “Make Better Today”—that technology can be creatively used to fix our communities’ most complex problems. The $5,000 grant we won will be used to help us build our Android application and design the data architecture to support the ever-growing Litterati community.