Litterati is a citizen science platform for tracking litter. It combines a smartphone app with an open-access database. Together, they make it possible to map plastic pollution at the street level. The platform turns everyday cleanup into usable, shareable data.
Users photograph individual pieces of litter using the Litterati app. The app tags each photo with the item type, material, and brand. AI assists with tagging. Additionally, the app records the GPS location of every item collected. Litterati stores all data in a shared database that anyone can access for free.
Traditional litter surveys are time-consuming and hard to scale. Litterati, however, lets anyone collect data with a smartphone. As a result, the dataset grows in real time across hundreds of locations. In particular, it links specific brands to specific pollution spots. This makes it a useful tool for brand accountability research and extended producer responsibility (EPR) policy work. Similarly, the street-level detail supports targeted cleanup planning in ways that broad monitoring data cannot.
Key capabilities
- Smartphone app (iOS and Android) for photographing and tagging individual litter items
- Tags each item by type, material, and brand using AI-assisted identification
- Also records the GPS location of every item, enabling block-by-block pollution mapping
- Interactive maps furthermore show litter hotspots by location, type, and brand
- In addition, the data is open access and free to use with no registration required
- Cities, NGOs, researchers, and brand advocates all use the data
Cities use Litterati data to plan cleanup campaigns. In addition, NGOs use it to back advocacy and policy work. Researchers, furthermore, use it to study litter patterns across different settings. Regulators have also cited the platform in legal proceedings. Several governments have, moreover, referenced Litterati data in producer responsibility debates as direct evidence of brand-specific plastic waste.
Litterati is free to use at litterati.org. For related plastic occurrence datasets, see the OEOO Microplastic Pollution Map. To explore more monitoring tools, browse the Plastiverse tools directory.