Case study of
#00097 Open citizen-science litter mapping with geotagged, brand-level data
Global (origin Cork, Ireland)
#00109
OngoingGlobal
Implementer
Seán Lynch / OpenLitterMap
Timeline
Since Apr 1, 2017
Location
Global (origin Cork, Ireland)51.8985, -8.4756
Description
OpenLitterMap is an open-source citizen-science platform where users photograph, geotag, and categorise litter, building a fully open global dataset of litter locations and types. Started in Cork, Ireland in 2017, it uses a blockchain-based reward token (Littercoin) to incentivise ongoing contributions and makes both source code and data openly available for reuse by researchers and municipalities.
Metrics
3Litter photos uploaded~500,000uploads
Contributors8,000+people
Countries with data100+countries
Lessons learned
- Fully open code and open data (code on GitHub, data via open API) enable reuse by researchers, cities, and third-party platforms without additional negotiation.
- A blockchain reward token (Littercoin) was used to incentivise sustained contributions; gamification of this kind requires a technical infrastructure decision early in development.
- Crowdsourced geographic coverage is inherently uneven — dense in areas with active contributors and sparse elsewhere — which limits reliability for policy use in low-contributor regions.
Sources
2Links
1Documented Jun 26, 2026