Description
OpenLitterMap is the academic precursor to a real-time impact mapping platform.
Starting pre-iPhone in 2008 with litter & plastic pollution mapping, our gamification of crowdsourcing research lead to the conceptualisation and development of OpenLitterMap.com which has grown to become one of the largest, oldest, and most comprehensive databases on litter, brands, and plastic pollution in the world.
OpenLitterMap was inspired by OpenStreetMap.org which is the most significant map and open database of the world which is continuously updated by over 10M volunteers. OpenLitterMap was invented to become the real-time data collection and reporting layer-2 solution of OSM in 2013 and is still in development.
So far, more than 8,515 people in 100+ countries have uploaded almost 500,000 images of litter and added 819,688+ tags of brands, materials, quantities, litter types and other non-litter tags. has received more than
and is recognised by Altmetric to be in the top 5% of scientific papers (n=26m).
During the OpenLitterMap research in 2015 we were introduced to the concept of tokenisation which lead to the conceptualisation of Littercoin - a geospatially produced reward that could be earned by contributing data to the platform.
But unlike most other cryptos, Littercoin is built different.
No ICO.
No exchanges.
No trading.
No logo.
Just proof of work for citizen science.
and memes
A smart contract holds crypto giving each littercoin value.
If there is $100 in the smart contract and 100 littercoin in circulation, every littercoin is worth $1.
However, users cannot send their littercoin to the smart contract to earn the $ in the smart contract.
To achieve this, we introduce a new concept to crypto - merchant tokens.
To burn littercoin and get the $ out, a special merchant token is required to interact with the littercoin smart contract.
Mission
A huge OpenLitterMap v5 refactor is currently ongoing with the help of AI
Problem
In the mid-1970s plastic pollution was first recognised to have a global distribution in the oceans. This information was locked away in paywalled (and publicly funded) academic papers until digital technologies unlocked the mass global production and consumption of public knowledge. No longer was access to scientific information locked away in institutionalised towers by academics who had the privilege of years of authorised opportunity to the scientific process. Almost overnight, billions of people became the worlds first globally connected generation and the awareness of plastic pollution exploded through video, documentaries and retweets.
Over 150 million tonnes of plastic are now believed to be in the oceans, which are only starting to fragment exponentially. Accelerated by petrodollar expansion in the 1970s, plastic production boomed enabling the fractionalisation of commodities and incredibly wasteful over-utilisation. However, now that public knowledge has become available, things are changing, and change they shall.
Over 5/8 billion people are now connected online yet we have only scratched the surface of humanities massively untapped active data collection potential. What is there was an incentive to participate? Some kind of fun zero waste reward based in reality?
Many people have absorbed the rapid development of technology with no training about its real-world data collection implications and are largely unaware of the real-world data collection purpose of the supercomputers that many of us now casually carry around everywhere. Society is missing public education in the real-world application of these devices and we are here to fix it.
Solution
Business Model
Smart Cities and Sustainability
Path to Success
Want to raise from VCs
Location of Impact
Global
Total Funds Raised
30,000