Litterati Is Using Geo-Data to Clean Up the Planet

The crowdsourcing site is leading people to where the litter is.
(Image: TakePart)
Presented byPresented by Lenovo
Dec 14, 2016· 0 MIN READ
Jeff Kirschner is the Founder & CEO of Litterati – a mobile app that is helping “crowdsource-clean” the planet – one piece of litter at a time.

Litterati is a community that's "crowdsource-cleaning" the planet, one piece of litter at a time. Through that process, we're collecting a lot of geo-data. Lots of it. That's both wonderful and challenging—wonderful in the sense that we're getting smarter about the global litter problem. Geo-data helps us understand which brands and products are found in specific locations, or where the Litterati community is most active, or consider how it can help cities be more strategic about where they place trash cans.

It's challenging because it's difficult to manage. The Litterati community has mapped and picked up 250,000-plus pieces in 100-plus countries, adding about 5,000 pieces each week. Imagine the technical challenge in loading 250,000 pins onto a map. That's a heavy load, whether you're talking at a worldwide, country-wide, or neighborhood view.

Worldwide

Inside The Business of Organics

USA

Inside The Business of Organics

Oakland, CA

(Map: Google Maps)

One of the things we're working on is managing that ever growing data set. How do we ensure that the data is not only properly visualized but more important, useful to the community? Loading all those pins onto a web page takes time. In our opinion, too much time. How can we speed that up? Is it a technology solution? Or perhaps a matter of a different design? Thinking about how we make Litterati's geo-data more accessible is just one of the things we're looking at this week.