Mapping litter and plastic pollution with citizen science

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), Amazon Web Services (AWS) invited Seán Lynch, the founder of OpenLitterMap, to share how AWS technologies and open data are helping to solve global challenges like biodiversity loss and plastic pollution with citizen science. Solutions like OpenLitterMap help unlock the potential that a global abundance of technology has for the collection and dissemination of pertinent data that is an instrumental part of positive social change.

Enabling visibility, problem solving, and community around litter

OpenLitterMap is an open source, interactive, and accessible database of the world’s litter and plastic pollution. Anyone interested in participating is invited to contribute to the database to support increased visibility and access to data. To enable citizen science and invite volunteers to collect data on litter and plastic pollution, OpenLitterMap used AWS Promotional Credit through the ASDI program to build its platform on the AWS Cloud.

Mapping pollution helps quantify and visually contextualize its environmental impact, and can also highlight the work done to address it as pollution levels change over time. OpenLitterMap supports an unrestricted approach to problem solving with the data, since everyone has equal, unlimited, and unrestricted access to the data to help create any kind of imaginable solution. The database is also developing a community by encouraging people to come together to respond to the pollution problem; OpenLitterMap supports weekly meetups with live open source coding sessions.

With OpenLitterMap, volunteer data collectors worldwide use their personal devices to take photos that capture information about the location, time, object, material, and brand of the observations and impact they make. OpenLitterMap can be used to capture a variety of data types and pollution-related issues, spanning anywhere from a single cigarette butt, to broken glass, bags of litter, dumping hotspots, heavy items that can’t be picked up by a single person, overflowing bins, oil spills, posters, and more. The platform has identified over 150 predefined types of litter, which when captured in one language and automatically translate into any of the other seven supported languages. Additionally, users can extend this by adding their own custom tags, which enables anyone to map data on anything.

Figure 1. The steps for adding photos to the OpenLitterMap database: take a photo on a mobile phone, tag the litter with identifying features, and upload your observations to the database.

Leveraging the AWS Cloud for volunteer data collection

OpenLitterMap is hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store its database of images. So far, more than 20 open-source developers have supported the development of code, available on GitHub, which is available for anyone to learn from, contribute to, or fork and take in any direction. To date, almost 7,000 people from 92 countries have uploaded almost 365,000 geolocated images, which have been applied with almost 600,000 tags. This data spans a variety of geographic contexts, from a single cigarette butt outside a hospital, to degraded microplastics strewn across a beach, and more.

By keeping the global map open, visitors can watch a live feed of events, including live uploads from current users and new users, or teams signing up. By selecting a live upload notification, anyone viewing the global map will be automatically redirected to the location where the data was captured. Immediately after uploading, a point will be shown on the map. New users are fully anonymous by default and must have their data verified by a small team of administrators before it can be made public. Trusted users bypass this manual requirement, but still have their data reviewed through a multi-step crowdsourced verification system which is used to generate trusted data for object detection with the forthcoming OpenLitterAI, which will also be made possible with support from AWS.

Once an image and its contents have been verified and potentially updated, all data are made publicly accessible as open data to enable quantitative and geospatial analysis. All the crowdsourced data is available to view on the global map.

The OpenLitterMap interactive interface illustrates the global environmental problem and aims to deliver a powerful message that individual knowledge and behavior change can make a difference. From university students to older retirees to companies, OpenLitterMap collaborates with members of the community to drive action and impact. For example, Engine Lease Finance, an aircraft engine repair and leasing company headquartered in Ireland, became OpenLitterMap’s first corporate sponsor and gave its global workforce a half-day from work to pick up litter and record their positive environmental impact on OpenLitterMap with their families to demonstrate their social and environmental commitment.

Figure 2. An interactive global map shows where litter and pollution has been recorded on OpenLitterMap.

Recognizing the role digital tools play in attaining the Sustainable Development Goals

OpenLitterMap was recently identified as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a multi-stakeholder consortium endorsed by the UN Secretary General tasked with identifying digital tools that can help accelerate the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Litter and plastic pollution are global problems with significant immediate implications for humanity and the environment. OpenLitterMap is trying to make the experience of using technology for real-world purposes and contributing to communicable environmental impact fun and straightforward, by turning cleaning the planet into a game. Worldwide, an increasing three billion people have access to a global abundance of technology that can be used to transform the production of geographic data. Inspired by OpenStreetMap, which recently passed 10 million users, OpenLitterMap strives to make it simple to contribute value-added observations on top of OpenStreetMap. The data can help inform tangible actions like where to put trash bins to prevent litter and more.

Visit the ASDI main page to learn more about the program. Explore other datasets hosted in the ASDI Data Catalog. If you are interested in hosting your data on AWS, consider exploring the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program.

Read more about ASDI on the AWS Public Sector Blog:

• Understanding wildfire risk in a changing climate with open data and AWS
• NASA and ASDI announce no-cost access to important climate dataset on the AWS Cloud
• Managing the world’s natural resources with earth observation
• Predicting global biodiversity patterns in Costa Rica with ecosystem modeling on AWS
• Bringing world-class satellite imagery to smallholder farmers with open data

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