It makes economic sense to pay people to clean the planet. That is the vision for Littercoin.

Paying people to pick up litter is not new. Millions are spent in many countries every year for cleanup intervention and management. However, the majority of work is voluntary. What picking up litter could earn some money? How long would it take to clean the planet? An hour?

Plastic pollution costs us millions in cleanup activities, and infinitely more in the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Millions of tonnes of plastic enter the oceans every year which will persist indefinitely. It is much cheaper to stop plastic entering the ocean than trying to take it out later.

In lesser developed countries where plastic pollution is even more problematic there is an even greater need to incentivise cleanups and it is even more cost-effective to do so. Check out this image of plastic pollution uploaded to OpenLitterMap today from Ethipoia

Free and Open Data on Plastic Pollution with Blockchain Rewards (Littercoin) -https://openlittermap.com/maps/Ethiopia/Addis%20Ababa/Addis%20Ababa/map

By being the first to upload from a Country, this user earned 100 Littercoin.

There was an uninhabited island visited in the Pacific recently said to have 38 million pieces of plastic on it. This is what all of our beaches would look like if we didn’t clean them up.

38 million pieces of plastic waste found on uninhabited South Pacific island

Thankfully many people do clean them up. I salute them and I would like to see them compensated for their work.

1 hour. That’s how long it will take to clean the planet if people could get paid to do it. That is the vision for Littercoin — define a monetary incentive for people to do the work. Just as Bitcoin miners create tokens through “proof of work”, we extend this paradigm to Citizen Science. There is no Littercoin ICO. The only way to generate is to do the work and create Open Data on plastic pollution.

If you think this technology is important and should be developed further, please sign up for €5 a month @ openlittermap.com/signup. We use Stripe for managing subscriptions which works just like Patreon but is even more cost-effective without the need for another 3rd party. Or if you like Patreon you can sign up there too @ https://www.patreon.com/openlittermap

Coming soon:

1. Lynch, S., (2018)., OpenLitterMap.com — Open Data on Plastic Pollution with Blockchain Rewards (Littercoin)., Open Geospatial Data, Software, and Standards., (in press).

2. Littercoin Whitepaper

3. Machine learning

4. Native mobile apps