Dear friends,

Every year, millions of tonnes of plastic waste makes its way into the oceans of our only habitable planet. The urban environment that we live on is punctured with holes, gutters and storm drains that facilitate what I call the "illusion of urban cleaning". You might think the place is getting cleaner, but every year trillions of plastic-tipped cigarette butts, millions of plastic bottles and lots of more waste slowly degrades on land (eg. from vehicle runover) and makes its way into rivers and the oceans where they will degrade indefinitely down to micro- and nano-plastic levels. Along the way, various plants and animals bio-accumulate different toxic chemicals, some of which we eat.

It is up to this generation to act and I am looking for your assistance. The most realistic way to achieve that is by opening up basic geospatial data, which OpenLitterMap facilitates by design.

To combat this destructive paradigm, I have developed openlittermap.com - A Citizen Science web-based litter-mapping game that enables anyone to share geotagged images of trash anywhere on the planet. All data is mapped, geospatially, quantitatively and categorically analysed and free to view and download by anyone. There are over 100-items across 10 categories and you never have to travel too far to find good data, so feel welcome to join this community and map, reveal, communicate and resolve the destructive threat posed by increasing levels of plastic pollution.

For examples, see

openlittermap.com/global

To navigate to different countries, use

openlittermap.com/maps/Country/State/City/map

eg.

https://openlittermap.com/maps/Ireland/County%20Cork/Cork/map

Notice how you can toggle the different layers to reveal different categories of related waste. This is a free awareness-raising and decision-support tool at your disposal. You may also dynamically change the size of the hex grid for spatial analysis and filter the data temporally directly through sliders of the url.

eg.

https://openlittermap.com/maps/Ireland/County%20Cork/Cork/map/07-09-15/27-04-17/500
{minfilter}/{maxfilter}/{hexsize}

If you can use this data to stop plastic reaching the ocean, please do. It is available to download by Country, State or City in 1-click as a csv, ready for import into your favourite problem-solving development environment. Still not good enough?

Say Hello to Littercoin ($LTRX)!

Now, dedicated litter-mappers who upload 7-days in a row are rewarded with LTRX, a new cryptocurrency on Ethereum. You can use this to pay anyone who accepts Littercoin and it is divisible by 1.0000 units. Soon, you will be able to use LTRX to vote on OpenLitterMap proposals via the OpenLitterMap DAO which will launch later this summer :-)

COSTS

As many of you know, there are costs involved with processing and hosting data on the web. There is a free account which will increase in upload allowance as you play OpenLitterMap but for as little as $0.30 cents or a maximum of 1 euro a day, you can finance the development of this innovative geospatial platform and empower me to hire other designers and developers (Like you?). I am a self-taught dev and I am building this from scratch. Over the last 12 months I have gone from "What is a div?" to Openlittermap.com and I have many more ideas about how to improve this platform soon as well as other geospatial and blockchain platforms. This is only the beginning for OpenLitterMap. You can consider me as your personal developer :-)

I hope you like this platform and I hope you will use it and accept Littercoin as a mode of payment or discount to reward dedicated litter-mappers who are working hard to protect our only habitable planet from millions of more tonnes of plastic waste and toxic cigarette butts.

Feedback, criticism, reviews, bug reports or personal insults welcome as always ;-)

Working to protect our only habitable planet,

PS. Check out my other article I uploaded earlier this morning

steemit.com/marine/@divemapper/msp-iczm-eia-out-the-window-in-bantry-bay

KINDEST REGARDS + HAPPY MAPPING,

Seán Lynch

@OpenLitterMap
MSc Coastal & Marine Environments
MSc GIS & Remote Sensing
BA Geography & Economics

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